After the game on Thursday night I’ve been thinking about Fabio Vieira quite a lot. The man bought with little fuss from Porto for £30million, who came out of left field, who we didn’t see at the start of the season from injury but now has two goals and an assist in the two starts he’s made for us since joining. I was very impressed with him on Thursday night and I think he got man of the match for his performance against Bodo/Glimt. He is just so technically assured on the ball and looks like he will be a massive asset for us this season. Arteta raved about him after the game, calling him an intelligent player, a real threat, etc. Of course he admitted that he needed to do more but that was more on the defensive side and sure, the player has more room to grow. But at his age and from the little I have seen of him, I’ve been so very impressed. He has an eye for goal, can spot a pass and despite his slight frame, isn’t looking like he’s just stepped off the bus from a Geography field trip. Not footballistically, anyway.

Anyway, back to why I’m making the Reyes (rest in peace, Jose) comparison in the title, because as I was running this morning I was trying to think about why he reminded me of somebody and Reyes popped in to my head and it felt like it fitted so well. I’m not talking about where they play; Reyes was a left sided player who liked to run with the ball at his feet. He was a guy who would be good in interplay but was pretty much a wide left player. He was probably a lot more rapid than Vieira is, although we haven’t seen too much of Vieira’s running speed just yet. I’m not sure that Reyes was as good at linking the play and dropping deep as Vieira might be. My memory is a little hazy but I do remember the type of player Reyes was to some extent, certainly as a good finisher – which he shares with Vieira, plus whilst at Arsenal Reyes was a man who got a decent level of assists too. It was some of the ball striking for some of his finishes I remember and Vieira’s first goal for the club against Brentford from outside of the box had a touch of the Reyes about it I figure.

But I think what I’m trying to get at with my comparison, and why it has stuck in my head so much, is the circumstances surrounding the two players’ arrival. Jose Antonio Reyes arrived in the January of the Invincibles season and I remember thinking it was Arsene Wenger really making sure he wanted to cement our grasp on the league title attempt that season. We started in January just a point behind United that year and a few weeks later we’d be a couple of points clear as United slipped up in the January. We already had Henry and Bergkamp, we had Kanu who could chip in and score goals, we had Wiltord who could play as a forward or a winger, we had Pires scoring goals for fun, so when Reyes arrived I remember being surprised that we even needed him. I kind of thought that about Fabio Vieira in the summer if I’m honest. He’d played as a wide left forward or as a support striker and we already had Saka, Pepe who was deputy, Smith Rowe who could play there, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we signed him, but it felt like we’d paid a lot of money and we probably should have focused on a midfielder and a right back this summer.

But the reason I see the similarities now too is I now see what Arsene was doing by signing Reyes, to raise the level of our forward line and attacking options that season, which Arteta has hopefully done exactly the same thing with the arrival of Fabio Vieira. In this Portuguese kid we have a versatile guy who is already knocking on the doors of being a regular if he keeps playing liek that and as fans, that is exactly what we want to see.

Who knows how his career will pan out and who knows whether it will go the same way as Reyes, which was unfortunate with all of the fake Real Madrid call stuff, etc, but it has started well and I hope it is the start of a long and positive relationship that Fabio Vieira has with Arsenal Football Club.

******************

From a press conference perspective, I could probably write another 1,000 words from what Arteta did or didn’t say, the team news being the now standard response from Arteta in giving nothing away. The journos are probably going to stop asking soon at this rate. He played his usual straight bat and didn’t give any opportunity for Liverpool to stick any inspirational messages up on their walls, which is what you’d expect, but it is clear that he had to spend a fair bit of time keeping a calm head and not sounding too over-confident ahead of what he knows will be a really tough game. And it will be a tough game. Liverpool will finish in the top four, I’m sure of that, they’ll also show just how good they are as a side tomorrow and they’re sure to get goals against us, but it will be about how we can also hurt them defensively. What I’m seeing from Arteta and his team right now that is pleasing is this feeling of “we aren’t there yet” and I just wonder if that will forever be his mantra. It is a good one to have; continuous improvement is what is the marker of great teams. You have to never be satisified, never be fully happy with where you are at, all striving for more. It feels like Arteta has that in his DNA and it feels like the Arsenal players are having that drilled in to them this season that has shown such a great laser focus on that need to keep being better.

Let’s hope it transmits itself on to the pitch tomorrow.

That’s it from me today. Off to do a day of chores like going to the dump, shopping, then cooking a lovely steak whilst crossing my fingers that Brighton can smash the scum and Man City can drop points against Southampton. Not holding out much hope for either but you never know, there could be a surprise or two in store.

Until tomorrow.

I could get used to this, that’s for sure.

I could also get used to The Arsenal winning lots more football matches and even the ladies got in on the action to trounce the Scumettes 3-0 at the Emirates last night. I’m not the biggest fan or follower of ladies football, but I’ve flicked it on once or twice and whilst I don’t watch too much, it’s always nice to hear that those representing the badge are getting one over on the old enemy. It probably won’t land them that title they need as the season finishes next week I believe, but at least Arsenal Ladies appear to be in a good place and going in a good direction under Jonas Eidevall.

As for the men’s team, I saw  this morning the Holding quotes about how Arteta gave them a bit of a pasting at half time against West Ham last weekend and how that drove them on to improve in the second half. I do think there was a slight improvement and obviously we didn’t concede in the second half so you can argue that it must have had some impact, but it made me wonder how much impact a half time shouting session has by the manager and how often he unleashes a tirade against players that he thinks are under performing. I have probably mentioned this before, but I was told about an article on man management that appeared in the broadsheets years ago, when Roy Keane was in charge of Sunderland, about how he drove them to Championship success in what I think was his first season at the club. I believe they won the league in this particular season and Keane and his approach was fundamental to that. Players spoke to being in awe of him, then of wanting to impress him as the great footballer he was, which drove them forward. But when they made the step up to the Premier League there was obviously a difference in class, but also there was a change that happened in the players. That was because after a couple of years of being given rollicking’s every halftime, or being in awe of him/fearful of him for so long, that kind of just…well…wore off. The players became numb to his approach and it didn’t inspire or change him. That’s why as a coach you need to vary your approach and it made me wonder about how often Arteta unleashes the hairdryer treatment.

Every couple of months? A couple of times a season?

I remember a game we won at Anfield under Wenger in which we came from behind to win. After the final whistle Cesc was interviewed and he said Wenger went berserk at halftime. He said he’d never seen him do that. But clearly Arsene was a ‘once a season rollicking’ man and at the right moment he knew he had to pull out that club from the man management bag. So how often does Arteta do that? When you look at him on the touchline shouting, encouraging, cajoling his players, you could be forgiven for thinking that he probably spends all of his time barking, but I wonder if he actually very rarely does it. Maybe he saves it for occasions when it is needed? That’s what I hope anyway, because there’s been a few people talk about how he’s not a great man manager, but I don’t think that any of us can really be unanimous in knowing this because we don’t have access to what goes on behind closed doors. We have to piece together what we know based on hearsay, paper talk, speculation amongst fans and when we see how many players have fallen out with him. But for the team to react when he gives them both barrels, whenever he decides to do it, must show that he has himself a core of players who will react depending on whether they are given the carrot or the stick treatment from Arteta.

And my hope is that we have a guy who in fact IS a good man manager and motivator because he knows when to go in which direction. We’ve had him as manager for two-and-a-half years now and although the personnel have changed, there are some players who are still responding to his approach, so I’m hopeful that it works. Regardless of whether we trip up in these final stages of the season, we have to acknowledge that this season has been better than last, that the team as it looks is more likeable than last. So from that perspective we can at least say we’ve gone in the right direction. And when you think that we’ve now confirmed our Europa League spot – which many thought would be an acceptable ‘par’ for this season to show progress, it feels like we’re going in the right direction to me.

Other than that there’s not a lot else going on. I suspect we won’t hear from Arteta until tomorrow so until that time, we can enjoy a serene Thursday as we look ahead to another massive weekend for The Arsenal.

You have yourself a good one.

It’s funny because when we lose I view the internationals as either a painfully slow creepy death in terms of football (i.e. you can’t get ‘back on the wagon’ with a result), or a momentum killer (i.e. what happens if you come back and suffer because the players don’t have the cadence of working together more regularly?), but either way I get to a couple of days in and I’m already wishing my life away. From a footballing sense, anyway. When I get to the weekend and I have other things to distract me with then it’s very different, but as it stands this right here is a proper ballache.

All the chatter appears to be about the Arsene Wenger documentary. I haven’t been able to get an early copy to have a watch but I will do; the great thing is that people who read his book and – like me – thought it was an average at best attempt at an autobiography, have all been saying positive stuff about this documentary. Probably because it’s been left in the hands of other people to manage, rather than Arsene himself. But I’m looking forward to reliving some of those glory days when I do get around to watching it.

I was at Uni from 2001 until 2004 in the North West and so when you are surrounded by northerners all supporting United, Liverpool, Everton, etc, what you can really do without is a stumbling and bumbling London club that you’re a supporter of. Thankfully I didn’t have that in the slightest and those three years were a delight in terms of the ‘bantz’ with different fans. I remember a Liverpool fan – mature student about five years older than most of us – telling me to ‘drink it in because they won’t always be this good’. My response, as a 22-year-old upstart with the arrogance and swagger of a fan whose team and manager was blowing everyone away, was just to respond with a ‘nah – best manager, best  team, we’ll be at the top for decades’.

Time teaches you many things, I can tell you that. But those three years were amazing and going to the pub in Lancaster to watch The Arsenal usually ended up in joy. In 2002 at the end of my first year I was in the Graduate bar (a college for all of the students studying a Masters or above) to see Arsenal beat United with that Wiltord goal in which I thought he was standing up with his fist in the air and Kanu had jumped over it about eight feet in the air. In 2004 I was back home for a couple of weeks when we clinched the title at The Scum, watching before I travelled back up north for my leaving set of parties before the end of my tenure at Uni. On both occasions I was in ecstasy at what a fantastic couple of teams we had and whilst Arsene and his demise at Arsenal is still too fresh for some people, my appreciation and thankfulness remains for one of our greatest ever managers.

There’s been some chat online about a statue, or naming a stand after him, which I can understand all he has given to the club. I’m not sure about a stand being named after him, but he should probably get a statue at some stage. I’m not sure right now is the right time though. I don’t really have a proper answer why, but in my head I feel like Mikel is starting to build something with his current crop and there is real potential in this team, so do we really need the physical and metaphorical spectre of a Wenger statue looming over us? It’s probably me being too sensitive but I just wonder if it is something the club should revisit at the end of the season, or even the season after, when things don’t really feel as tense. What I mean by ‘tense’ is how delicately balanced everything is right now. A win and we’re top of the world, a defeat and all the worries come rushing back. When we play Liverpool in a week-and-a-half’s time it’ll probably be a ‘free hit’ but when we rock up at home to Newcastle the week after that, a defeat at home to them would probably have a lot of people getting frustrated again too. Including me I hasten to add, because I feel like I’m usually in line with what most normal Arsenal fans feel; in that I don’t have a stupid “kick him out” mentality regardless of what the football is doing because I want to get a few more clicks to my YouTube channel, or the swing the other way where you have to support him regardless of how turgid the football is. I’m just a guy who wants to see Arsenal win at all times but I have a moderate view of where we are at and what is success and what is failure.

So for me I think the statue debate for Wenger is one that should be had, but maybe not yet, with perhaps him returning to watch a game the next step because there will be appreciation, etc, when that happens. But even that needs to be timed right. Imagine we’re playing a game in which we need three points at the end of the season to get in to the Champions League, or Europa League and Wenger turns up, only for the crowd to chant his name, etc, etc – it would feel like a bit of a distraction, no? I think it would and in a tense atmosphere you don’t need that. What we need is a final game of the season in which we’ve already hit our objectives, it doesn’t really matter what the scoreline is, so if there is a bit of a distraction at home to Everton, it doesn’t really have an impact.

Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. But until then we focus on us, Wenger focuses on his role at FIFA, but we should all have a little moment to thank him and tip the cap to a man who brought us so many happy memories.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Of course I am jesting, but at this time right now and after another disappointment at the weekend, I feel like a bit of Gallows Humour might as well be feasted upon, because right now it is isn’t exactly the most fun you could be having being an Arsenal fan. The whole season has felt like we’ve had as many signs of progress as we have of regression and lately, as we mercifully see the end of this wretched season in sight, I find myself for the first time starting to think about Arsene Wenger’s old ‘judge me in May’ adage, but applying it to Arteta and his first full season in charge too.

I’ve started to properly think about that and realise that unless he succeeds with victory in a competition in which the tiniest of margins could see you go out – the Europa League – there will be so many of us Arsenal fans who will ‘judge in May’ and when that judgement comes,it feels like right now it won’t exactly be the most positive of ones.

I am fully expecting us to finish between 8th and 12th, most likely 10th it feels like right now, because we seem to be permanently stuck in 10th and it doesn’t matter whether we win, lose or draw, that is where we remain. Looking at that it feels as though we’ve regressed and that is what we must be expecting to feel if we finish in 10th come May. But what is weird is the fact that last season after 27 games we’d actually got one additional point more and were sitting in ninth. It’s still hardly an upgrade. But the distance between the top four and below has grown, because last season it was Chelski on 44 points, this season they are on 50. That is the real worry rather than our comparative league position and points accumulation.

The worry is that we are drifting, or at least standing still, whilst other teams – even in this bat-shit mental season – have been clawing back points in the second half of the season. We’ve been better in the second half of the season but the mountain we were left to climb was from the first half of the season. So if Arteta can manage to continue to stabilise the ship more – even though it doesn’t feel like it with all of the individual errors we make every week – then how will we be able to properly judge him and his performance for his first full season. Things got so bad in the first half of the season that a really successful end with a load of wins is going to feel like some kind of success story, when in fact you have to look at the whole season and conclude that we haven’t really learned very much at all.

If we win the Europa League it’ll be Arteta’s second season in a row in which he’s delivered a trophy. That will be amazing and there is nothing like lifting a shiny silver trinket to boost a club. And for a club like ours which has so rarely been victorious in European competition, it would be a sign of massive success that we’ve once again brought something home. I’ve made it clear that I think it is an extreme outside bet given all of the teams in the competition, but we are still in it, we can still win it. And if Arteta and this Arsenal team do indeed win the trophy, it will feel like we are progressing. But when you look at the final league table in isolation, it will be hard to make a case that over the duration of a season, for your bread and butter that is your marker of how good a team REALLY is over a consistent basis, we will have been found wanting. AGAIN.

At this point it is worth pointing out – once again – that I still back Arteta. I want him to have a crack at next season and I see signs that he can coach some players in to being better. But he also can’t coach the ‘stupid’ out of some players and if he decides to keep them around, then I’m afraid he makes himself a target, fair game for fan ire because he fails to recognize when the players he puts his trust in simply aren’t good enough. Which is why I don’t think either way we can ‘judge him in May’. I don’t see how it is possible to properly judge him until we get in to next season and see whether he can coach in consistency whilst shunting out the stupidity that has cost us results this season. I think we’ll probably get a better indication of it by 1st September actually, because by then he will have laid all of his cards down and we’ll have seen whether he is going to continue to put his faith in those that make mistakes, or if he himself has learned from his and has been ruthless in exiting some of those players who have cost him this season.

I am hopeful that he will, but decision making like leaving Martinelli out all of the time versus the continued attempts to resurrect a dwindling career in Willian’s, make you question.

I hope he gets it right. I am desperate for him to get it right. But I don’t think we’ll know until September whether he has got the summer right, then November, to see if he has the (lack of) consistency question right too.

Catch you all tomorrow.

The international breaks I mean.

It still rumbles on but thankfully not for much longer and whilst some people still got suckered in by the prospect of seeing Thomas Partey strut his stuff for Ghana last night (apparently he racked up a couple of assists in a 5-1 win against Qatar), I couldn’t really bring myself to watch anything if I’m honest. So I played with my new kitten and then went shopping. Far more entertaining than a bunch of international football matches.

Some people made different evening choices, however, and one of which included an evening with Arsene Wenger talking about his new book. It is out today but I suspect I’ll wait a bit before I make my purchase. Mainly that is on account of the fact that everywhere seems to be selling out as Arsenal fans flock to purchase it in the hope for some gems that are hidden within the pages. I’m not sure we’ll get the dirt and if I’m honest i’ll be shocked if we do; Arsene is a man who will take some of the more controversial stuff to his grave I suspect and even if it meant a larger opportunity to make the sales go stratospheric, I’d be stunned if there was anything more than him talking about his philosophy on how football should be played, what his life was like growing up, etc.

He always used to joke when he was our boss that he’ll leave the true stories to his book but when push comes to shove we won’t get a “warts ‘n all” rendition of his life. I’ll still buy it though because this man had such a long lasting impact on our football club and whilst the last couple of year’s were painful and should have been cut a lot shorter than they were, ultimately he is a guy who delivered us a wealth of trophies and we should be eternally grateful for that, with his crowning achievement being giving us something that even when we see clubs like Liverpool blowing away league campaigns, we can still ask “yeah, but is yours gold?”

We can always be pleased about that.

We can also be pleased about his effusive praise about Mikel Arteta and Le Boss Talked up his current squad, saying they’re good enough to win the league this season at the recent Sky evening event that took place recently. Last night he was at the Palladium so I don’t know if he was asked a similar question, but to hear him speak in such glowing terms is heart-warming; he could have played it cautious and said that it is the beginning of the journey and I suspect if you asked Mikel that’s what he’d say, but Arsene was clear that he thinks it is a good enough squad to have a go.

Personally I’m not convinced and having watched Liverpool blow us away a couple of week’s ago I certainly wouldn’t say we have the best players in the league. They were promptly dispatched by Aston Villa the following week but that feels like a freak result more than anything. There have been times at which teams who are not the best set of players in the league have managed to get together winning runs to take the title though. I don’t think Leicester City had the best set of players when they won the league, but they were very consistent and that saw them through, combined with the right tactics and counter attacking style.

I think the difference between that year and now, however, is that there are probably at least three teams that are better than us in terms of what they have on paper. You can’t look at Man City and Liverpool and not say they are better than us and whilst I am hopeful we can make a good account of ourselves this weekend, I’m not exactly putting my house down as collateral on a win, so to speak. But I also think Chelski probably have a better team than us too. They have spent big and will be a force to be reckoned with this season, eventually when they get up and running, even with the relative lack of experience that Lampard has. Then you’re looking at the Tiny Totts and their firepower that has just been bolstered and you have to wonder whether between us we’re very similarly matched. I think United aren’t looking great but in a few week’s we go to Old Trafford for our annual dropping points/defeat to them, no matter how terrible they are, so it’s a very difficult league to the one that Leicester City took everyone by surprise on back in 2017.

As it stands we’ve won three from four and we play Man City this weekend, followed by Leicester City and then away to United, then it’s Villa, Leeds and Wolves before a trip to the scummers at the beginning of December. By the time we’ve hit mid December we’ll have played 11 matches and be just under a third of the way through the season having played all of the traditional ‘Big Six’ away from home except Chelski. If we’re still in a decent position in the league and but a few points from the top four then you never know, but as I already mention above, I think that is very much an outside bet. You only need to look at most of the bookies to see that we’re in at between 20/1 and 25/1, behind Everton, Tottenham, City and Liverpool.

So whilst I admire Arsene’s optimisim, I think I’ll temper any Harry Redknapp-esque excitement until we get towards the Christmas period; then we’ll have a look at where we’re at.

And on that note it’s me done for another day. Catch you lovely people tomorrow with some more random Arsenal-related thoughts that pop into my head based on what we’ve read.

Laters.

Selfishly I hope it bombs. That’s because I’m one of the people that is lucky enough to watch my team play football most weeks. Well, I say “lucky” but we all know it hasn’t felt like that this season, not if you’re an Arsenal fan. Then when you add to it that I pay some of the highest prices for a season ticket in the world, it also doesn’t feel as lucky. But I’m sure you get my sentiment. That’s because we all know the broadcasters and the Premier League have treated match-going fans as second class citizens with their kick off times, VAR, etc, for some time now. This becomes the final hurdle.

I hope it bombs and I hope people find it really weird and silly that there is crowd noise being pumped in on your watching pleasure, because it will be weird to think that 50,000 people are being synthetically replicated when your eyes can clearly tell you that there is nobody at the ground.

The next step will be the Premier League telling the makers of football games to start super-imposing computer fans in there. Much more easier to control too. That’s where they’re getting the noise from on Sky – EA Sports – so why not just whack a few fans in the background too, eh?

Sky have also chucked in – for my own viewing displeasure that I won’t link to – a piece today about the 50 signings that ‘got away’ in the Premier League era. It reads like a depressing Arsene Wenger monologue about what could have been. I used to hate it when Arsene would talk about that sort of stuff because, frankly, all it does is annoy people and all it serves to highlight is that sometimes we didn’t actually do everything in our power to get the playing. Like signing Upamencano in 2015 for £1million, or Riyad Mahrez before he joined Leicester. Nope, I’d rather tnot be told about that sort of stuff thank you very much.

It does get you to thinking about Arsenal’s transfer plan this summer though. I don’t really know if there is one but you’d hope so. After it emerged that we’d essentially told football agents to “shut up and take our money!” on the David Luiz deal, then factor in the eye watering amounts that must have passed hands on the Pepe transfer, and you worry that this summer is going to end up being more of the same poor moves made by the hierarchy at the club.

If you think about the last five years as an example, there have been some pretty horrendous decision making that’s gone on in the transfer market, which is why we’re in the mess we’re in at the moment. I’ve just had a quick look at Transfermarkt and since 2015 we’ve dropped (just transfer fees alone):

• David Luiz – £7.83million
• Sokratis – £14.4million
• Mkhitaryan – swap but the value is £30.6million on Transfermarkt
•  Xhaka – £40.5million
• Mustafi – £36.9million
• Asano – £3.6million
• Lucas Perez – £18million
• Elneny – £11.25million

That’s nearly £160million on players who it is questionable whether they’ve truly lived up to their value. That’s £32million a season we’ve spent on average to bring in players who haven’t really fully succeeded at the club. Over five years. So it just serves to show you just how poor we’ve been across not only the Wenger and Ivan regime, but also the Raul and Emery time too. It’s why there needs to be a serious step-change in our approach somehow and if we’re going to get into the Champions League places again, those changes need to happen soon before Champions League qualification becomes further away than ever.

There does also need to be more accountability at the top of the club. We talked about that from an ownership perspective with KSE when it comes to the ‘We Care Do You’ campaign, but there needs to be accountability for those running the club on a day-to-day basis. In many ways this next 12 months should make or break them. You can sack a manager, you can sell players, but football executives should also have their heads on the chopping block if they are failing at their duties and if we’re having similar conversations about the failings of the club in 12 months then I don’t think it unkind to look at Raul et al and start to ask whether more change is needed at the club.

It’s time we started to reverse this slide and in Arteta we all like to think we have the right guy for the club from a coaching perspective, but perhaps we need to start keeping a closer watch on the guy running the football administration, because he has plenty of questions still to answer.

Catch all of you lovely people tomorrow.

Here’s the thing: I like Mikel Arteta. The noises that come from every corner of the footballing world suggest he’s an accomplished coach and by all accounts is a great man. He’s got Arsenal pedigree behind him and that will also give him some goodwill in the bank when he arrives at the club eventually. But that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to have big concerns about his appointment.

The biggest and most obvious worry is that it represents a risk because he has never been a manager of a team before. He’s had some excellent mentors, of that we can have no doubt, but he himself has never had the hot seat and as time has shown us again and again being in charge and being the one in the firing line does not feel the same as any other position you can hold in football. Years ago Brian Kidd was viewed as an excellent assist manager, was inseparable from Alex Ferguson, but when he left United to take on Blackburn it was pretty much a disaster and the guy quickly went back to being an assistant manager.

Blackburn were a relatively small team, still in the Premier League, but fighting for survival and they took a gamble. It didn’t pay off. Arsenal are not – well, not yet, anyway – fighting for survival, we’re not a small team and so this gamble by the clubs hierarchy feels absolutely massive right now.

Imagine Arteta comes in this week, looks around at the broken pieces of this first team, then is unable to pick us up over the next two weeks. Imagine we get done by Everton, Bournemouth, then at home to Chelski and United. By then we will be in a dogfight and we’ll have a guy who has never been in that position as a manager. How do we know he’ll be able to turn it around?

We don’t, because we don’t have any data to suggest what sort of motivator he could be. Sure, he has a big influence at City and sure, lots of people have said how he does a lot of tactics and team talks, but ultimately Pep is the man with the final say. Ultimately Pep is the one that keeps all of the pressure and has to drive his team on.

That’s why I’m nervous. Not because I don’t like Arteta, or don’t think he is going to be a great manager, but because we are effectively using Arsenal as the ‘test bed environment’ for a manager. It’s a risk and a gamble of epic proportions. The Arsenal hierarchy have already said how much the lack of Champions League football has cost us, yet it looks like they’re ready to go all in on black to borrow a roulette phrase, in the hole that some sort of seismic shift can happen with a group of players who have shown that frankly they are incapable of displaying the mental strength to pull us out of this mire.

Let me try to centre myself a little bit though, because I appreciate I’m coming across a little negative, because “what if?” Of course.

• What if Arteta can replicate the same situation as Arsène when he arrived? After all, Arsène was unknown in England, albeit he joined at 46 and was already a winner from his time in France.

• What if Arteta can get that new manager bounce and that carries us through Christmas. If we had 9 points from the next 12 points available things will be looking very different as we hit January.

• What if he will actually get the backing of the board and be given money to spend so he can bin some of the absolute wasters we’ve got in our team? Particularly in defence…

There’s a lot of variables in this appointment and ultimately it’s a few too many for me to be unequivocally excited and expectant of a new dawn at the club. But at least there is something there in a new coach like Arteta.

The worry I have is also those above him. This Arsenal board may not have the cash to invest in improving this team. They have also shown themselves to be as hesitant as the last regime and the delay in pulling the trigger on Emery was a black mark against them. But so is the fact we’ve not had a new manager for three weeks. If they wanted Arteta, who was a consideration last time, why not go out and get him a couple of weeks ago? What have we achieved by waiting? The only outcome of the boards inaction has been more defeats and more sliding down the table. We sit 10th this morning. We are literally the definition of mid table mediocrity. It’s pitiful and I’m afraid we have to look at those above Emery as well as the players, to see that the problems at Arsenal won’t be resolved with Arteta alone.

But we have to back him. We have to cross everything and hope he can turn this around. To quote a Star Wars reference (given it’s out this week):

He’s our only hope.

Sobering.

Catch you all tomorrow.

What I always find fascinating about these breaks is not so much the football itself, but rather all the speculation that seems to be whipped up as a result of players going away with their respective countries on international duty. It happens almost as regular as clockwork that something slightly controversial seems to crop up. We’ve had it in the summer when all of the noises around Torreira seemed to surface and once again we have a little bit of nonsense around another one of ours.

Of course the news I’m talking about is the fact the Swiss FA are saying that Xhaka will need time off to become a father when the next international break comes around – as well as Xhaka himself saying he may take time off – is our latest talking point.

I must say Granit doesn’t help himself sometimes. He’s just come off the back of a pretty shocking performance in the North London Derby, followed up by an interview – in English so you can hardly blame translation issues – to say “so what?” In effect to his actions that cost us three points, whilst now saying that he’ll take time off to become a dad.

Now, I’m not saying he shouldn’t be at the birth of his child, of course he should. If, for example, his wife was due to give birth on a Friday but it went until a Saturday, then you’d not expect him to play on a Saturday or perhaps even Sunday or Monday of that week. But I’m reading talk of paternity leave and I’m like “wtf?!?”

He’s entitled to it as a UK resident of course. And for every other Tom, Dick and Harry nobody begrudges them that two weeks time off. But if we’re seriously talking about that for footballers then I’m afraid the world’s gone mad. Well, madder than it is at the moment, anyway…

For one thing footballers don’t work the same hours as a normal employee. They do about four or five ours a day. They are also paid so much at that level that ten years of working is enough to set you up for life. They simply don’t need paternity leave because they don’t work the same level of hours and so Xhaka will get plenty of time with his child straight after the birth anyway.

I know people are talking about us gradually phasing him out of the starting XI anyway given his propensity for error, but he’s still paid vast amounts of money by the club and no matter what you think of him he is a player we can use and so should be wishing he is available for selection as much as possible.

My hope is that this is just spurious conjecture and that when he does become a Dad he’ll miss maybe one game, max.

Of course it could come over the international break and therefore not affect us at all and I believe that’s why the Swiss are talking about this. But regardless of whether it affects us or not, my hope is that this isn’t a worrying trend we might start seeing.

The only other noises around the club, after a pretty quiet weekend it has to be said, is that Arsène Wenger did an interview saying he wasn’t prepped to got back to the Emirates any time soon.

I think that’s fair enough and his reasoning makes perfect sense, stating that he didn’t want to cause a cloud over Unai Emery and his team on the touch line, which is a good move in my opinion. Just think about what it was like when Moyes took over United that season. Ferguson was there almost every home game and almost every home game featured a camera panning to him with a “You wonder what he would be thinking right now” from the commentator of the day. The same would happen with Wenger in the stands and so we need a little more time to elapse before we get him in and the inevitable fanfare that would ensue.

Other than that there isn’t really a lot else that’s been said about the club over the weekend. There are some noises about Torreira possibly picking up a knock whilst in the Uruguayan national team but I can’t find anything other than one or two very tenuous links, so we just have to hope that it’s a wee bit of scaremongering from some of the press.

So I’ll call it a day with that one and I’ll catch you all in the morning.

Laters people.

This morning I had a look at my Twitter feed as I brushed my teeth, mindlessly flicking through to refresh the feed as the menthol taste permeated through my mouth, to see somebody had made a comment about Alexis Claude Maurice, who said he wanted to join Gladbach. The comment said something like “Emery’s done it again” and had been liked by a few people, those people who clearly have an issue with Emery and want to poke fun at him.

And if I’m honest it annoyed me. It annoyed me because there appears to be a collective of our fan base who, having derided the ‘lack of class’ shown by some fans for wanting Arsène Wenger to leave the club, they are showing the same level of intolerance as if it isn’t just as disrespectful.

I – like many of you I’m sure by the end – knew it was time for Arsène to move on, but probably only getting to that stage after he won the FA Cup and then decided to stay two years more, despite the fact that the decline in the team was starting to show. I would never have classed myself as a ‘WOB’ and if you know me you know I’m a normal fan, go to games, want Arsenal to win above anything, etc, etc.

And I still do. I consider myself a patient man too. I saw how poor we were the season before last and deep down I knew that getting us moving in an upward trajectory would take time. I was prepared for that. So when Emery came in I was ok with it. After all managers these days come and go and he had a complete rebuild on his hands. Changing a style and fabric of a club from top to bottom after a ‘one man show’ was always going to be difficult and I think Emery has made mistakes. He’s picked odd formations, he’s presided over a pretty pathetic end to the season culminating in that disgrace of a cup final, he’s over played players and as I suggested yesterday, he’s also not blooded as much youth as I think the club will have wanted.

Perhaps he isn’t a master tactician. Perhaps he isn’t the answer to all of Arsenal’s woes. But do I want him gone this summer? No. Will I be putting flippant remarks about how he’s a clown and doesn’t know what he’s doing? Of course not. Have I turned on him yet? Heck no.

That’s because I’m not a snap judgement football fan. I believe in giving Emery a shot and for me we see how he gets on next season. This is especially the case when you see what meagre budget we’re supposed to be working with this summer. How can you completely overhaul a team in a summer when you’re working with peanuts?

Let’s also not forget that Emery is the coach and it’s other people at the club that go out and get the players. Putting things on Emery at this stage – and by people who were such vehement supporters of the previous manager to the point of labelling our own fans as ‘disgraces’ for hounding him out – is a level of hypocrisy I just can’t abide with. People in glass houses and all that jazz.

So what happens if this season doesn’t work out? The club look for a new option. We got Emery on a two year deal and if it’s not going the way we want then so what? So we look to another direction, that’s what. That’s what modern football is and we need to accept that it is short termism, but that doesn’t mean we have to want to go the crazy and extreme levels you get at a farce of a club like Chelski. The Arsenal have always conducted themselves with a bit of decorum and I’d like to think we should be giving somebody a bit more of a shot that what some people have been doing. One season for a manager to impose his style is nothing. Especially when he’s following a legacy manager.

I also think we have bigger problems than who is the coach because there is a cloud over Arsenal that has been hanging for some time. That cloud is silent and American in nature. The Kroenke’s are dragging Arsenal towards mediocrity and anybody not spend the bulk of their ire and attention on a quite frankly appalling owner needs to rethink their priorities.

Just some thoughts on a random Wednesday for you.

I find myself with that one sentence – the title of today’s blog – that keeps ringing in my mind and it brings me right back to feeling anger over a performance that was befitting of a team that has given up like those Arsenal players did yesterday. All of the old stereotypes of Arsenal in the last five to ten years coming spiralling back towards me; all the cliches about lack of character and ‘mental strength’, all of the comments from non-Arsenal fans. The fragility. All of it feels in sharper contrast today.

Arsenal has it all in their hands and needed to show a mental fortitude over the last week that would see us over the line. A win at home to Palace and a draw at Wolves would be massive.

Yet here we are, zero points better off in the league, six goals conceded in two games, as well as a performance that was more akin to a side on the proverbial beach than in the position we are in right now.

This collective of Arsenal players are broken and it’s no longer a question of it being Arsène Wenger who is the psychological problem. His stamp on the club has been fading for over a year now. His influence long since waned. Yet the inability of some of those players to show the basic level of fight at a crucial time in the season was as big and booming as a Brian Blessed monologue.

Wenger is still responsible for bringing in some of the players, of that we can have no doubt, but those players have shown yet again that psychologically they are not fit for the purpose we hope from them; that is to say challenging towards the sharp end of the division.

Unai Emery must also take the blame for yesterday’s sh*t show and he needs to have a long, hard, look at himself at a time in the season where fans were starting to admit that he’s getting his rotation right. Koscielny playing yet another game for example get like it was asking for trouble. But I don’t want to dwell on individuals today because I think that it is a collective malaise that exists at the club and I don’t think it’s anything that a couple of transfers will solve.

Something big has to happen and whether or not the club’s hierarchy has the minerals to do anything about it I don’t know. I’m not suggesting Emery should be sacked, but he must surely be backed if we are going to set our stall by him this summer, because this squad needs an overhaul.

Technical level the players are good enough, but last night they showed that mentally they are miles off. This team is so flawed it beggars belief.

‘Psychologically damaged’ is all I can think of. You can’t have a team so capable at home suddenly become so incapable away from home. It defies logic. So it simply must be a mental thing and the fact that this is now spanning two seasons suggests to me that some of them just need to be moved on. There’s no other way that we change the fortunes of the club than to remove some of the weak-minded players that we have.

I have no favourites. No player is sacrosanct. I don’t care who goes. Let’s rip it all up and start again.

This isn’t even all about losing. Yesterday we lost. It happens. We got caught and Wolves capitalised. But that sheer lack of fight in the second half feels all the more damming to me and that is why I don’t really care who goes in the summer. The incentive of Champions League football was there. The goal was clear. It was within our hands. Yet those players simply cowered when given the opportunity.

They are cowards. The turning backs on the first goal for the free kick epitomised that. They are not a team who is fighting for Arsenal. They won’t move heaven and earth to hit their targets. When the time comes they will wilt.

And that’s why I’m more angry today than I have been at any other defeat in the last two seasons. Because we’ve seen the true faces of some of these players and quite frankly, it’s an ugly, ugly face.

You can visibly see this team deflate as soon as one setback happens in a game. It’s shocking and for individuals capable of some of the results they’ve had this season it is shameful to see the lack of determination like that second half performance.

All the USB video footage in the world won’t help Unai Emery when you see how some of them react to adversity like last night.

I’ve got a few mates who still think we’ll do it. They think that United could potentially do us a favour at the weekend. I have lost hope because even if we get the best result possible we still have Leicester and Burnley away from home and right now I can’t see us picking up a single point. Because Arsenal are broken. Those players are broken and mentally I’m just not sure if there is any return for some of them. Perhaps they don’t deserve it either.

I’m feeling rather low today. The excellent performance of Napoli away is so far gone from recent memory that all I can feel is an impending sense of dread. Watford has nothing to play for and outplayed us with ten men. Crystal Palace has nothing to play for and outplayed us. Wolves have nothing to play for and pulled our pants down. Leicester are on the beach most likely but they’ll give us a tonking at the weekend, because as soon as that first goal goes in against us, I can’t see any of this current crop of players responding.

Sorry, little else to say right now, so I’ll leave it there.

It marks yet another example of what I honestly deem negligence on behalf of the club that we are losing a player at his peak physically and age-wise to yet another free transfer. Yet again we have a player who has seen his contract run down and left the club in a poor negotiating decision from the off.

So that’s Nasri, van Persie, Sagna, Alexis, Özil, even Walcott tan down his deal until the club signed him up on vastly inflated wages, which then made him difficult to move on until Everton came sniffing.

It marks a period of time in which from a commercial and business perspective we have, quite frankly, been an utter joke. Holding on to players too long, waiting too long to negotiate, not protecting their market value and the result is situations like this. Which we have seen time and time again and it appears the club never learned any lessons.

Well, that was under the Gazidis/Wenger reign, which from a contract negotiation perspective we have to hope that the new hierarchy have learned lessons.

We have to have learned lessons. We aren’t a club with an owner willing to plough cash in to the club and as a result sensible buying and selling is what we have to be good at. But we’ve been shocking at it and the result is this latest first team player walking off in to the sunset with a staggering payout because Juve don’t have to pay a fee.

From a Ramsey perspective I haven’t always been the biggest of fans, but it’s fair to say I’ve flip-flopped based on his form, because there’s been timed where he’s frustrated me, times where he’s elated me, but what you can’t say is that he’s been anything else other than the consummate professional. And the fact he’s found his way back in to the Arsenal team having been ostracised to some extent by Emery shows just how great a pro he is. Unai wouldn’t have him back in if he wasn’t and my hope, now that we have clarity, is that we can give a club legend the send off he deserves, because he is a club legend.

Think about his goal against Hull. Attacking midfielder arriving at the right time in the box to win us the cup.

Think about that goal against Chelski. Attacking midfielder arriving at the right time in the box to win us the cup.

Aaron Ramsey has not once, but twice, written himself into Arsenal folklore and for that we should all be grateful. Even those fans who aren’t his biggest fan. I still remember both of those moments and I hope I can remember – god willing – those two goals until my dying days.

He should be applauded every time he plays and my hope is that the fans get behind him in appreciation for the rest of the season. There are bad ways (Adebayor, Nasri, van Persie) to leave the club and there are good ways to leave the club and Ramsey has chosen a good way through his behaviour and connection to the club. 11 years is a long time in football and when he retires he will be known as an Arsenal man, regardless of who he goes on to play for, which is nice.

As for Arsenal, we need to look at what type of player we need to go for that fits Unai’s system. Whether that is a direct replacement I’m not so sure. The challenge Ramsey has when he started the season was that Unai played him in a high press, but that only lasted a few weeks and then it seemed like he didn’t really know what to do with him, or what his best position was. Do we need a wide forward instead? Do we need a different type of box-to-box midfielder? Perhaps one who is a little better on the ball? Ramsey was a goal scorer, a player late arriving and somebody who liked a long-range shot, but he wasn’t somebody with vision. Perhaps a player who can spot the runs of Lacazette or Auba is a better option?

We also need to sort our sh*t out and to me that means taking players like Holding, Bellerin, Torreira, Guendouzi, Lacazette – all players who have looked good this season – and making sure they get nowhere near the last 18 months of their deal. If there is no decision in sight from a player and his representatives then be clinical: move them on for a decent fee and reinvest the cash. As it stands we are heading for a pretty penny-pinching summer because we don’t have that many obvious saleable assets.

It’s not how a club our size can be run and certainly not going to get us back to the top table.

And as for Gazidis, well, as every passing week goes by I thank my lucky stars that we’re rid of the guy, because he has been a massive cause for some of the f*ck ups we’ve seen like this current contract situation. I hope Milan are sitting up and taking note.

That’s probably where I think I’ll call it a day for now. We might get some team news ahead of BATE on Thursday so let’s see just how ‘injured’ some of the players were last weekend.

Laters folks.

Of course we’re all disappointed. We know that Arsenal probably need a decent centre half, a wide forward and possibly another full back, but I think the reality of Unai’s words are just the veil being lifted from the tragic mismanagement of a club that is supposedly the sixth richest in world football.

The poor decisions made by the trio of Stan Kroenke, Ivan Gazidis and Arsène Wenger have left us in this mess we currently find ourselves in.

For Stan it is an owner that probably turns white at the prospect of ‘speculate to accumulate’. He doesn’t want to spend a buck to get two back. He’d rather take half of that buck and put it in his piggy bank, whilst hoping the other 50 cents sprouts green shoots and magically makes him more money.

The sad thing is that’s exactly what has happened due to the money swirling around the Premier League and Champions League trough.

And the likes of Ivan Gazidis lapped it up whilst he could. He saw that we could basically be a profitable entity by simply treading water and has used that to his advantage. From a personal point of view he probably thinks he’s played a blinder; mismanagement with a bit of fortune that the Premier League money spiralled, whilst feeding spin and then when it looked like it was all going to go Pete Tong he jumped ship.

And he has jumped ship. Consider this: one year ago we signed the Mesut Özil mega deal, whilst also picking up Aubameyang. Great PR for Ivan and he made sure he was snapped with Sven in Dortmund doing the deal. Fast forward to the summer and there’s rumours of his exit. Seven or eight months later. Chief Executives don’t just go on Indeed.com and search for roles. They plan waaaay in advance and Ivan will I’m sure have been putting the feelers out at least a year ago.

But to really show you’re a top draw CEO you need to make sure you have a few gems to show your potential new employers. The Özil deal said to those Ivan wanted to “hey, I’m overseeing this guy and his renewal. I can keep our best players” and the Auba deal said to the same people “hey, no Champions League, no problem! I can sign the big players and get the deal done”.

Make no mistake about it folks, Ivan Gazidis has a massive role to play in the shoddy situation we find ourselves in.

But so does Arsène Wenger. Arsène spent years procrastinating on players. He spent years turning his nose away from deals to tell us that we could have signed that player years later. He kept his network and didn’t think to freshen it up. When he needed a cabinet reshuffle to get new voices he buried his head in the sand.

And now we find ourselves with plenty of overpaid and underperforming players. I say underperforming because for the transfer fees and wages we paid we really should be looking at being an established club. Yet the top four looks a little bit beyond us this season and finally, ahead of an away game to West Ham, we get the current coach admitting that it’s all a bit of a mess.

But what if we’re saving all of our cash for the summer?

That would be lovely and if we could all trust that the club truly did have a “war chest” in May, June and July then perhaps it’s something that we could stomach, but we all know where this is going. We all know what happens in the summer and it involves Arsenal hoping that those young players we have step up, because Arsenal spending £100million to dine at the top table just isn’t us.

And it never will be under Kroenke. I don’t know very much about the accounting side of football but I do know that until Arsenal file accounts with companies house at the end of February we have no idea what the situation is with the finances. And by then the window will be well shut and we’ll probably know our fate with regards to the Champions League too. If we miss it, well, I suspect it’ll be another summer of praying for a few untapped gems.

Sven and his diamond eye will have never had to work as hard.

We should be talking about the game tomorrow. We should be looking at a bright future at The Arsenal. But right now it just feels like the failures of the past are etched a little too clearly in our minds eyes to get us thinking about the stuff we actually love.

Perhaps things can change and let’s all be pleased that two of the three protagonists are gone from our club. If we could just get the final millstone from around our collective necks in the shape of Stan Kroenke and KSE then that would be great. Sadly, however, it feels like that particular turd will not be flushing itself for some time.

It’s fair to say that the guys over at Arseblog don’t tend to go for second-guessing, click-baity nonsense, so I think we can take it as a pretty sure sign that our Chief Executive is off to Italy for pastures new.

What I find fascinating about this is how it appears his imminent departure is being viewed by some as a sad day for the club. We ran a poll ahead of our show tonight on LoveSport – moved to Tuesday for this week – asking how people felt about it. At the time of me writing this it was 4% of people who felt ‘sad’, 28% ‘glad’ and the rest ‘indifferent.

I can’t believe there were as many as 4% who were ‘sad’ to be honest with you. I mean let’s look at the reality of his tenure at the club. He’s been here ten years. He’s probably taken the best part of £20million over that time. And what has been delivered?

Very little in my opinion. The way he’s handled the last six months or so has been good and the movements to get the infrastructure in post-Arsène were the right thing to do, but apart from the last year what has he delivered?

Good speeches? Promises of change? Talks of being like Bayern?

There are literally dozens of sound bites of Gazidis talking about how Arsenal are as a club and where they are going to get to and what we find is that he has presided – along with Arsène – over a period in our history which has been ok at times but given the potential he himself talked up, has not delivered.

He talked of a ‘catalyst for change’ but it took him over a year for anything to come to fruition. He was a man beholden to Arsène Wenger who, when the club needed a figurehead to stand up and talk about where we were going, was conspicuous in his absence. He has literally stood in Arsène’s shadows and just wheeled out the odd soundbite as and when an AGM came around.

Some might argue that the revenues of the club have skyrocketed in the last ten years. That they certainly have, but the sheer volume of cash swilling around the money vacuum of the Premier League meant it was hard – no, impossible – not to have a football club whose revenues wouldn’t vastly inflate during this period.

I’m not an accountant, I can’t be relied on to give you chapter and verse about his performance as a CEO in driving commercial revenues, but you don’t have to look far (Google ‘Swiss Ramble’ or look him up on Twitter for a start) to see that in line with other ‘big’ clubs Gazidis has – at best – achieved what he is expected to have achieved given the stature of the organisation that he has led.

And yet his bonus has kept on rolling in. He’s delivered what was expected because for so much of his time in charge Arsène had delivered what was expected and the bare minimum – Champions League football – so he’s been able to keep on riding the gravy train of wealth without much fuss as far as the Kroenke’s are concerned.

We have had a politician who has fed us spin for so many years that as soon as we have a moment where he has delivered there are people saying it is sad to see him go.

But this works for Ivan. He’s able to spin this with Milan so he can net himself a big payday and then move on to UEFA in probably four or five years. He’s already ‘in there’ at UEFa and that’s his end game, but adding another European team on to his CV is what he wants. I understand that, but nobody can convince me that he’s getting the Milan job because of the stellar work that he’s done at Arsenal over a prolonged period of time.

Ivan Gazidis has given us six good months of transition and now, without his fire blanket of a lightning rod manager in Arsène Wenger, he is moving on. And he’ll be doing it at a time early enough in the new era at Arsenal that he can say “hey, I’ve moved on, so if it hasn’t worked it’s not my fault”.

Ivan Gazidis is the Samir Nasri CEO. He’s given us six months of decent performance but before that, it was all a bit ‘meh’ to be honest. And now, just like Nasri after he had six half decent months, he’s buggering off to line his pockets elsewhere.

I think it’s fair enough to assume that I’m most definitely in the ‘glad’ camp that he’s going. He has hardly been an inspirational figurehead at the club and despite the issues I have with the Kroenke family, I’m sure that as a businessman Stan will be looking at somebody who will improve on a pretty low bar to be honest. It will most likely be Josh Kroenke. Maybe he’ll be somebody who can actually deliver on the change that Gazidis spent ten years telling us would come but ultimately hasn’t under his tenure.

Arsenal don’t need Gazidis. We will move forward, be stronger and hopefully if the appointment is the right one, be able to eat at the top table of football again. My hope is that in a year or so’s time we can all be glad that Milan have taken Samir Gazidis off our hands.

Laters folks.

I’m not entirely convinced it will you know.

The reason I say this is because we’re still so early in the season and he’s still so unsure of all of his players, that it feels to me like he’s going to be making these types of frequent substitutions on a more regular basis earlier in games, but only whilst he properly susses out his team.

I could be completely wrong of course. This could just be exactly who Emery is. But the substitutions and the decisiveness in the way they’ve been made, feels to me a little like a man who selected a team for an opposition, realised “oh sh*t, that didn’t work” and then has shuffled his pack a little.

There’s nothing wrong with that by the way. We’re all human and he shouldn’t be expected to make the exact perfect line up against every opposition; football is a game of so many variables that it is a very difficult task. But it does feel like right now he’s still testing a lot of players and that’s why we’re seeing halftime subs.

I get the feeling that by the time 2019 rolls around we’ll be seeing less of these changes. By then he’ll have had half a season with his players, they’ll have been fully embedded in his philosophy and they’ll understand what he wants. And by then those that don’t play by Emery’s rules will surely be finding themselves with less game time.

That’s how it should be. The coach is there to ‘coach’ a style and we can’t have players dictating the way the team lines up. For one thing our footballers have shown that they aren’t really capable of doing things on their own. That was Arsène’s approach – to let players work out situations on the field through his trust of them and their own intelligence – and it didn’t work. So now we’re doing things Emery’s way and that means that some players probably aren’t going to be coming on the journey. They’ll probably find themselves getting yanked more too.

But for now it feels like there are opportunities for quite a few players and hopefully that is enough to keep most of them motivated. Iwobi, for example, had patches of good play against Chelski and even cropped up with a goal. He spoke about feeling sharper under Unai and if there is any other player who is wondering how they are going to get in to the team, the inclusion of Iwobi gives hope to a few, because last season was pretty shoddy from him and at times we Arsenal fans were left scratching our heads as to how he gets in to the side.

But he played at the weekend and you have to say that by-and-large he did ok. If he’s taking the positives from Unai and his methods, then the next few months will tell us a lot about which players are reacting and which aren’t, and of course the way the substitutions are made will be key.

There’s a fair bit of talk about Özil and how he might be a player who could be for the chop. Personally I don’t see it. I vehemently defended him yesterday on the show and I maintain that a team with him in it is infinitely better than a team without it. But what we have to do is find the balance in the side to make him shine.

I think that will come and it feels like these first two games will be treated in the correct isolation that they should be viewed. But this weekend there needs to be a performance. From a lot of players. We need to see a reaction and we need a win for the players to feel like we’re going in the right direction. They’re all saying positive things now, there still seems to be a good spirit in the camp and these players appear to be taking the substitutions in the right way, but a few more defeats and you start to wonder how much longer that will go on for.

I’m sure we’ll get some sort of injury update today, or maybe tomorrow from the boss, but until then it’s adios amigos and ciao for another day.

Laters.

Arsenal still reside in Singapore and we’re getting plenty of emoji-based icons to denote how hard they’re working, how they’re doing double sessions, all the while being given more access to backroom footage than we’ve ever been given before. It’s nice to see that we’ve been granted a little more access to the inner workings and on the Football side it looks like the mood is good in the camp. All smiles and all good.

Which is just as well because on the administrative side of the club, the noises about Gazidis heading off to Italy to try a new project just won’t go away and unsurprisingly, Gazidis isn’t exactly first to the mic to tell everyone he’s staying at Arsenal.

Of course he won’t do that. He’s human. We’re all human. Having his value reassessed by people in a positive way like the current transition has been up until this point is nectar to his ears, because a couple of years ago there were calls for his head and protests outside the ground also questioning what he does.

Now he finds himself front and centre following Arsène’s departure and lol and behold we see a bit of speculation; all good for the man’s ego and so I can see why he would entertain it.

But the idea that he would jump ship now, as he has just been given the keys to the Aston and told to ‘have a go’, seems beyond bonkers to me. He’s a guy who has spent years in the shadow of Arsène and suddenly he’s surfaced and looked to me like a man with a purpose. With a point to prove. A guy who wanted to show he could manage a seamless transition and improve a football team for the better. If he left now it would feel to me as if he’s taking it because he’s not as assured in his own ability to transform a club as we were led to believe.

This was Ivan’s time to shine and so far he’s overseen a rather sunny outlook. And not just because that fiery ball in the sky keeps popping up every day over London this summer!

So to see him move on would be weird and in my opinion, stupid on his part, because he won’t get any of the potential kudos a successful season at Arsenal could be. He’d also be taking on a Milan who seem to be in a worse position than we are, with a lot more work to do, in a league which isn’t as commercially lucrative as the Premier League. It feels to me like he’d be taking a step down, pressure and challenge-wise, which would be odd.

Or would it? Perhaps he wants less of a challenge? Perhaps he’s at a time in his life where he doesn’t want as much pressure? Perhaps the Arsenal job has been one in which it’s been pretty easy because he’s always just had to sit in the background as Arsène took the brunt of most public ire?

If any of the above is the case, then you really have to question whether it would be better for Arsenal if he left anyway, because we really don’t need a CEO with a ten year record of being a background player in the theatre that is professional football, who jumps ship as soon as the first sign of having to step up occurs.

So I guess my overwhelming emotion of the Ivan to AC Milan rumour is that whether he stays or goes, it would be best for Arsenal, because I don’t believe that we want somebody who isn’t prepared to have more of a public profile. Ivan has spent many years saying lots of positive things and speaking very well, but if he left now you’d have to conclude that they’re just hollow words. The hollow words of a politician.

But I suspect he’ll stay. Certainly for this season to manage a transition. I could imagine that an Arsenal team with the backroom staff already embedded for a season would be one that he could probably say “I’ve managed transition, I’ve done my bit, now it’s time for me to move on” would make more sense. So I wonder if some of these rumours now are the beginning of that happening. Which would make more sense.

Ugh, all this talk about Ivan and the way the club is run, and not a bit about the playing side. But I guess that’s football these days. We watch a spectacle that is run by a conglomerate to make money. Lots of money. We love businesses. So we have to get used to talking about the business side of football.

Anyway, there’s a friendly tomorrow so at least we can pour over every minute of action to give us an insight into what Emery’s Arsenal will look like.

Back tomorrow with some sort of match preview.

I don’t know whether today will be a relatively short blog because if I’m completely honest, I’m struggling to get too bent out of shape over rumours that Ivan Gazidis could potentially be on his way to AC Milan. You’d have got long odds on that happening, on a website like this website, six week’s ago that’s for sure. Especially as he was masterminding the exit of Arsene and the ‘New Era’.

I have no real issue with Gazidis. I think he’s done an okayish job at Arsenal and now that he’s managed the transition at Wenger we would see whether or not he does indeed have what it takes to steer Arsenal in northerly direction towards the summit of the Premier League. But in the decade or so that he’s been at the club he’s hardly been the massive driving force that he might have liked to have been.

Perhaps that was because his hands were tied with the control that Arsène exerted, but there have been times in the recent past in which he’s had an opportunity to speak out a little more than he’s done, whereas at other times he’s said a lot of very impressive things, but it hasn’t always been backed up.

If he were to jump ship any time soon it would just tell me that perhaps hiding behind the fact his hands were tied by Wenger was something that suited him.

Huh, look at me, I said I wasn’t really that fussed about talking about Gazidis and yet here I am nattering away five paragraphs deep into today’s ramblings.

It’s probably because there’s little else going on. There’s so little going on that the other day I switched my Twitter notifications for the Arsenal Twitter feed on. I’ve been regretting it since however, because they do tweet a lot of rubbish, I have to say. I keep finding myself dismissing 75% of what they’re going on about but just like when my brother Steve and I had to keep watching Lost for fear of the next episode being amazing and revealing all, I find myself not able to switch off the Arsenal notifications, just in case something important is announced.

There’s some semi interesting reading from Arsène Wenger after he did an interview for beIn Sports and he gives some interesting snippets away. I do find myself still a little bit reticent to read or listen to his stuff just yet though. I think it’s kind of like having to listen to an ex partner after a break up or divorce. Sometimes you just need a little time and I think for me I need a little bit of time away from Arsène’s words and interviews before I can go back to the man who I once revered so much. I’ve skimmed through the interview but stopped about halfway through. Feel free to have a read if you so desire.

Right, that’s pretty much it from me today, on account of there being little else going on other that Unai working his players into the ground. We hope.

Catch you on the other side of today. Also known as tomorrow.

This is the type of profile of player that we needed at the club. Lucas Torreira may be small but he looks like he’s got a bit of bite to him, certainly the energy about him, as he alluded to on the official website when talking about the ‘garra charrua’. Personally I think that it sounds like a tiny little dog that yaps too much and that celebrity Z-listers keep in their purses, but apparently not, apparently it’s something that is difficult to describe but includes a bit of tenacity thrown in there.

What I hope we get from him is energy and the ability to cover ground. I think we saw some of that for Uruguay at this World Cup and if he can continue that form for The Arsenal as he did for his national team and Sampdoria, we could have a very important cog in the Emery machine.

He impressed me during the World Cup and what his signing does is show that this current Arsenal structure is more than just visiting old stomping grounds. The arrival of Sokratis did feel a tiny bit underwhelming, particularly because it looked like Sven was just going back through his old numbers in his little black book, but signings like these show that the club is looking hard to find the right pieces of the Arsenal puzzle to put together a successful team.

It’s also heartening to see this business done early. The worry with the Torreira situation is that post a World Cup a player’s value can skyrocket and you can bet your bottom dollar that had we have done what Arsenal traditionally do in the past and sniff around a player for five to six weeks, we’d have found a club in Sampdoria who knew they had multiple suitors, knew they had the upper hand in negotiations and knew they could charge a premium. We’d have ended up losing a player like this because we’d have baulked at the price.

I think Arsène Wenger would have been one of the biggest contributors to the former stance we would have taken in years gone by, but I don’t think it would have been all him, so perhaps there is a realisation from the club that we need to just be more decisive on a player. So the results of that are now evident in the current rapid nature of the acquisitions this summer and we can now look towards pre season preparations and the start of the season without the worry of gaping holes in our squad that feel like they need to be filled.

Quite what it means for how we’re going to line up I’m not so sure. We have a team which is looking quite full now and there’s no doubt that some trimming probably needs to be done. I’d expect that to be Jenkinson, Ospina, probably Martinez, a centre half will surely have to go out on loan, plus someone like Willock needs more minutes. If Ramsey doesn’t sign a new deal soon I suspect we need to start looking at getting some cashola from him too but such is the club’s swift response to getting what it feels it needs this summer, that I’d feel confident that we’d at least have a replacement of sorts lined up. I doubt they’d give us exactly the same as what Ramsey produces but it feels like a good plan B could be on the cards if we lose the Welshman.

So all-in-all I think we can be happy. No more deadline day scrambling, no more “we’re one or two short”. We have what we need and now it’s up to Emery to get the most out of his squad and get them 100% ready for the visit of Man City for the first game of the season.

#FeelingPositive

We’ve spent years being led to believe that it’s Arsène’s laissez-faire attitude to team structure, to specific and detailed instructions, that have been an issue for these players. We knew that he was a man who preferred to trust on the intelligence of footballers to ‘work it out’ themselves when there were instances on the pitch that required tactical shifts in approach to play.

We knew that this approach to Football had become dated and as a result the man who once could do no wrong in the eyes of us supporters, looked a lost figure, a dated relic of a time long past. Like woodchip walls, VHS tapes and an Atari.

And I’ve heard so many Arsenal fans talk about some of the qualities of our players. About how they’re not playing to their full potential, they’re regressing, they needed change more than anybody else.

And now we have it. But I can’t help but wonder whether it was in fact Arsène holding some of these players back with his approach to games, or whether it was in fact some of the players that we have that have been the issue.

Perhaps, just perhaps, some of them aren’t as good as we think they are. Maybe some of them are just simply not built for the Premier League, where as others just don’t have the mentality for its ‘blood and thunder’ approach?

Let me be clear on Wenger for a second though, because he is equally culpable either way, I’m afraid to say. Because if it was his approach to modern day football that was holding the players back, then we can all breathe a sigh of relief that these players will step up and hopefully we’ll be more competitive more quickly. As football fans we want to see The Arsenal back up the top as quickly as possible and if it was that the players just needed a fresh voice and more emphasis on overcoming our weaknesses, then happy days.

But if these players really aren’t good enough then again you have to look at Wenger as the main man that brought these players in. We all know that Wenger was judge, jury and executioner on a player and their subsequent Arsenal career and unlike every newly elected Politician, he can’t after 22 years blame it on the previous incumbent.

These were his players. He sanctioned every one of their rise into the first team or purchase from another and if we see that actually their poor performances were not down to tactical deficiencies on the part of the manager…well…that’s all the more worrying in my book.

It’s more worrying because it means that the road to glory is longer, more expensive, plus has a greater propensity for failure. The risk is greater and it will mean more years of transition than I think we were all hoping for.

The new season brings with it more excitement than anything else in my mind. But by the beginning of November I think the answer to my question will be presenting itself. As a result we’ll also know just how much more work is needed to make Arsenal one of the best again.

Laters people.

I’ve watched this interview a couple of times now and when you see what he’s saying written down on paper or online it certainly looks like he’s giving Arteta his backing. But perhaps it’s just me, perhaps after years of looking into Arsène’s eyes at press conferences, pre and post match TV interviews, but there was something in his eyes that said to me he’s not entirely convinced by what feels like the inevitable decision to appoint the Spaniard.

And that makes sense. It makes sense because whatever people say about him, nobody can argue that he won’t want the best for Arsenal Football Club and we’re all collectively saying (most of us anyway) that this is such a massive gamble.

It is a huge gamble by Gazidis. Imagine if we feet into December and we’re out of everything and further adrift than ever before. Imagine if this looks like a massive Ivan vanity project for his ego because much like Arsène, he’s wanted to do it ‘his way’ and it has failed spectacularly, with everyone on the clubs back again. Imagine the chanting in the stands. Yes, if it went wrong there’d be calls for Arteta to go, but I think the direction of fan ire would be more directed towards Ivan, rather than how it has been solely on Wenger for the last few years.

Wenger is gone. There’s no more parachute for the likes of Ivan. Sven and Raul are still new and so will probably be able to survive one dodgy appointment. But do you think after positioning himself as the main man, moving his office to London Colney, bringing in senior appointments as he’s done, Ivan could get a free pass from the fans, media and more importantly for his job security the Kroenke’s?

I don’t. I think this is his decision and he must know that if it fails it’ll be on his head. If he has the final say and he ends up betting the house on a risky appointment he must know that his head could – and probably should – be on the chopping block by the Kroenke’s.

Bringing in Arteta is a massive gamble on Ivan Gazidis’ tenure.

But if – and it is an ‘if’ because I acknowledge (and desperately hope) – it goes well, it will be the making of Gazidis. Arteta would get plaudits and it would be justified if he makes this successful, but I think the fans would also give props to Gazidis too. There are still many who think that he showed a bit of cowardice to not speak up at times last season and this season and many will probably see how Ivan manoeuvred Wenger into where we’re at now and think that there was a bit of backstabbery that went on. But I think a lot of the uncertainty under Ivan would dissipate if he puts his balls on the line and comes up trumps for the benefit of Arsenal.

And that’s what we are all collectively praying for. Whoever the manager is will get the fans backing come the first game of the season and all we all want is to see them do well.

It’s a an exciting and scary time being an Arsenal fan at the moment.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Arsène’s time as Arsenal manager has now finished and thankfully it did so with an away win. A monkey that had firmly attached itself to this team’s back has been prized from its metaphorical shoulders with Arsène’s final win and the man who we have all known as our manager sails off into the sunset without us after 22 years as captain of our ship.

The game itself pales into significance, but briefly before this talks about an Arsène Wenger discussion, it had parts of it in which we can at least take some rays of sunshine for next season.

Firstly, we kept an illusive clean sheet away from home, which has been few and far between for us this season. There were some scary moments like when Huddersfield hit the bar and Ospina made one or two good saves, but we held on for the clean sheet and for a defence that has looked so beleaguered all season, at least we can take some solace in the fact that these players can actually defend properly. Whatever about the fact Huddersfield are safe, and there might not have been the intensity had that not have been the case if they were desperate yesterday, I’m taking whatever small crumbs I can from yesterday’s win.

And it was a win that once again delivered a goal for Aubameyang who has now notched ten this season again. Now imagine what he could do in a full season for us if he stayed injury free? We could easily be talking about a 25 goal+ forward in our team for next season and as Liverpool have shown this season that will always give you a chance of success. I’m excited to see what a full pre season and availability in all competitions can do.

As Arsène alluded to in his post-match presser there are some good players in this Arsenal team and although we don’t know who will be charged with setting them up next season, there are one or two that we can be excited for seeing next season.

But yesterday was about bidding farewell to Arsène and it happened with a pre-game walk and clap for appreciation from the manager towards the away fans, as well as a 22 minutes celebratory round of applause for the manager in the game, aeroplane banners thanking him, the works.

Arsène got his farewell at home to Burnley last weekend. He’s been given the appreciation of the Huddersfield fans and the away support yesterday. He leaves with us thanking him and not shutting him out the door with a press release on the Arsenal website like we probably would have seen had he have gone next season or at the end of this season had the club pulled the trigger when all of the football had finished.

This was an exit that his service deserved. The last few week’s have been good to give the man a proper send off and I’m glad everyone has got to give him that.

But now we must turn our attentions to the new man coming in and just as the dust was settling on yesterday’s result we got news from Italy that Allegri has pretty much said he’s staying at Juve next season. Of course things change quickly in Football and of course it could just be for the press that he’s saying things like that, but it sounds on face value like we might not have a shot at getting this serial winner and if that is the case, the list of names that are intensely linked with us looks decidedly short on experience. Everything seems to be pointing in the direction of a certain assistant manager at Man City and whilst we all love the guy, I’ll not pretend that I’d be over the moon at getting a novice in charge at a club as big as Arsenal.

People can chirrup at me all they like and say that nobody knew Arsène when he arrived, but this is totally different, because for one thing Arsène was an experienced manager who had won the French league and been managing a couple of clubs before he took the job. Arteta has no such experience on his CV.

Anyway, that talk is for when it looks increasingly likely that we’re on the verge of making an appointment, which I am hoping will be soon but I have suspicions that it probably won’t be for another week to ten days minimum. The club need to let the dust settle on Arsène’s reign, there needs to be clear daylight between the old and the new and as soon as the new manager arrives we will all have press conferences, commentary, etc, in abundance.

So it’s a case of sitting back and waiting for this all to unfold.

For now it’s ‘Merci Arsène’ one more time, and goodbye.

Catch you all tomorrow.

It was like Arsenal’s very own version of Night of the Long Knives, with Ivan deciding that his power needed consolidating by making sure that the old guard were given clear indications of where their futures were.

Away from from the club.

Gerry Peyton Gone. Neil Banfield gone. Sal Bibbo possibly gone (although still to be confirmed). Born Primorac gone. But probably the most alarming of all of the departures of Steve Gatting and Carl Laraman who, whilst they should be celebrating leading the Under-23s to their respective league title, instead find themselves suspended this morning following accusations of bullying.

IT’s this kind of news coming out, right at the end of it all, which starts to make you question just how many issues there were at the club that were just being left whilst Arsene had complete control. I’m not saying that Arsene new anything of the bullying issues, because he most certainly wouldn’t have tolerated it, but it feels to me like we’re starting to find out of some of the issues only now that his reign is ending and the natural assumption that he tried to portray at the club that everything was rosy in the Arsenal garden, clearly wasn’t the case.

Perhaps it’s the fact that after two decades of employment there were some people who thought their positions were without reproach or recrimination? P{perhaps a culture where everybody knew they would be protected by the overarching presence of Arsene Wenger? And perhaps his exit has now opened pandoras box?

Who knows. But there’s one thing we do know, and that there will be plenty of change at Arsenal this summer. Some people are speculating that these exits are part of an entourage for a big name manager coming in, but I’m not so sure, because as much as I’d love Allegri to come in and see what he can do with this collection of Arsenal players, I don’t think we’d be exactly to his liking right now. He’s a guy who will probably look at this Arsenal team and say “I need north of £120million to turn this side into winners” and as we’ve seen in recent years, Arsenal value sustainability and sound financial management above competitiveness in the Premier League.

So no, I don’t think this clearing out is for a big name to come in, but I do think that it is happening because Ivan, Raul and Sven probably all want to have a clean sweep of the old Arsene guard and get on with moving the club forward without any remnants of the old empire.

It does call into question the issue of getting a younger manager in though. Tricky Mickey Arteta has been long touted as a successor but he’s part of an entourage, not the man who brings the entourage, so would he really be the right man to be stipulating who comes in to join him? A younger manager also represents a bigger gamble too, so do you really want to take a risk on a younger manager and have him bring in a load of people, only to find it might not work out and then shunt them out of the door along with the manager if you have to sack them?

It’d be nice to have an indication as to how well the club are progressing with their search, but I can kind of understand why we haven’t seen very much just yet, not whilst the season is still ongoing. Technically. Ivan et al will want to see this season finish, then I suspect we’ll also have a bit of time for dust to settle, before a new man being announced. The club won’t want to be seen to be having a new man jumping into the seat of Wenger whilst the red leather manager chair is still warm I think. So I don’t think we’ll get anything from the club next week. Perhaps the week after but I would suspect we’ll have an announcement right at the beginning of June. That way it’ll give a decent amount of distance between the new and the old regime, some of the players leaving on a free transfer will be out, plus a new man will have a couple of week’s before the World Cup starts and so he can have some time to work out which games he’s going to watch his new players in during the World Cup.

It means another couple of weeks of frustrating silence from our perspective, but let’s all face it, this appointment sets the tone for where Arsenal want to go so it’s important that they get it right.

Right then, that’s me done for another one, I’m off to buy some World Cup stickers. Back tomorrow with a match preview. Maybe – i’ve got a Eurovision party and things can sometimes get boozy-messy….

Of course the journos lapped it up. Talk of saying goodbye to trees, having early press conferences just to wind the journos up, plus many more quotes that had them all chuckling into their microphones and iPhones. And as I sit here thinking about those journos who have made more than enough references to how he should go, yet telling us as fans we were the ones that hounded him out, I can’t help but smirk at the hypocrisy of them all.

They have poked and prodded at him for years. They have made comment after comment about him and now, at the end of it all, it is these same journos that fawn at his every word.

Perhaps they just realised that they’re not going to get such an erudite man as Arsène as the next in charge. Perhaps they realised that with him going that’s the last of the old breed of manager disappearing, being replaced by the sullen likes of Mourinho. And perhaps they’ve realised how much fun that won’t be.

Everything that is Arsène’s ‘last’ feels weird right now. Every occasion marked hits home that he will no longer be the centre of all Arsenal attention this time next week. When the news was announced that he would be leaving I was obviously pleased because it was the right thing for him and the club to do, but I don’t think it has even sunk in yet that he’ll be off from next week.

Even the little things he said yesterday, like having to do some work in France on Monday and Tuesday and then coming back to London Conley to clear out his desk; all of that kind of stuff chips away and reminds me that “oh yeah, he isn’t going to be around next season” and, well, it’s just strange.

It’s not as foreign to me as some though. A lad I go to football with – Tom – is in his early 20s and all he’s ever known his whole life is Wenger as Arsenal coach. I at least have a George Graham and Bruce Rioch frame of reference. For Tom what lies ahead is strange and alien. For me it is evolution and the next chapter in an illustrious club’s history. But that doesn’t make the feeling any less weird to me.

There wasn’t really much talk of the team for Sunday’s game at Huddersfield but let’s be honest, I don’t think it really matters and despite saying his mind is on preparing for Sunday’s game, the press nor Arsène offered up any real team updates. I wonder if Arsène will just make it up on the day.

“Lads, I’ve hidden your kits throughout the Huddersfield stadium. The first ones to find them can start. To find the kits, you’ll need to decipher a series of clues, each more fiendish than the last…”

I suspect the team will be up for it though. They should want to put on a final showing for the manager and although it was another sh*tshow result on Wednesday, there did look like there’d be signs of the players wanting to go out with a bit of effort. More on that probably tomorrow and a match preview on Sunday I think.

For now everything is just about soaking up the good times of Arsène’s reign. Of appreciating what he has brought to the club and also looking at some of the cool things the club are doing every day to remember his legacy and the good times. Check it out across the different social mediums. It’s quite nice I have to say.

Right, not really a lot else going on, so I’ll take my leave and bid you a good day.

Laters folks.

I could talk about the worst run of away form for Arsenal in the league since 1966. I could talk about why we seem incapable of replicating the ‘home’ Arsenal that has seen us so impressive at times on our home soil, yet away from home we look so bereft of confidence you wonder how long it will be before we actually pick up a single point away from home.

That’s how shocking it’s become: we aren’t even talking about wins any more, just a single point, that has eluded us and shown this team to be pretty spineless at times in the last five months.

It’s a really tragic end to a managerial career and with Huddersfield away on Sunday you just wonder if there will be more misery to come.

What’s weird with this game is that in the opening exchanges we looked up for it. For large parts of the second half Arsenal looked up for it too. Yet the same deficiencies at the back cost us in both a goal and a man disadvantage.

Mavropanos could be deemed to be harshly given a red given that Holding was on the cover but in real time he’s in the centre and Holding’s run is diagonal behind him and so I can see why the – appalling – referee gave the red card. I still think there’s a good player in there but he’ll need some pre season games now to prove it because he won’t get a chance on Sunday I don’t think.

That sending off turned the tide the way of Leicester and they peppered us a bit before halftime, with Cech coping admirably with their efforts. But in the second half at least the players reacted. There looked to be some fight and in Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang we have a gem of a finisher. Next season will be exciting just to see him getting the nod from day one and with him available in all competitions we know we have a player who will get us goals and assists anywhere.

Sadly though, right now, we also have a defence who will shoot themselves in the foot anywhere too. Then, whilst hopping around on that foot, that same defence would look down the barrel of the gun to see what comes out before shooting ourselves in the face.

It’s what we do.

Leicester’s second goal and penalty was as soft as can be but it feels like Leicester are masters of that against us. Remember Vardy kicking his leg out at The Emirates a couple of seasons ago?

Of course it was that little scummer that smashed the ball home and of course it was then Mahrez who made the points safe in stoppage time. I didn’t bother listening to any commentary so I can only guess how often the terrible commentators made references to Vardy turning down Arsenal and Mahrez being a target. Yawn. Effing yawn.

I’m more interested in those players currently playing for Arsenal and it has become clear over a number of games this season that change can’t come quickly enough. Harsh truths need to be dealt out. I’m not specifically talking about this game but the season as a whole; this game meant little in the grand scheme of things but there are some players in that Arsenal team who need to realise that if they don’t perform there are serious consequences for them. That simply isn’t the case under Arsène any more.

There needs to be personnel changes. Significant personnel changes. We need a bastard managing the team. And by that I don’t mean a Conte or Simeone who would shout and scream every five seconds at them, I mean a stone-cold manager who will hook off a play on 30 minutes if he doesn’t look like he’s fighting. I mean somebody who doesn’t have favourites. I mean a person who thinks “hang on a second, my job is on the line here, I’m not taking any chances”. That is not in Arsène’s make up and where historically he has had enough backing and history with the club’s hierarchy to feel confident that he could make a decision like playing Ospina in a semi-final second leg, rather than being a bastard and telling the Colombian that he is second choice to Cech and so that’s why he isn’t starting, this time it hasn’t worked. Now we need somebody who is going to make that call.

What’s sad and something I thought about this morning whilst I was on my morning run, is that even as little as five years ago I remember worrying about losing Wenger because some of our best players would leave the club. I don’t feel that way any more. That may be partially due to the fact that it doesn’t feel like this club has many players that are indispensable and so it’s hard to feel too attached to some of them, but I also think it’s because Arsène isn’t as much of a draw any more.

In fact, I don’t think many managers are for players, because these Dad players join clubs for ‘projects’ and money. Ten years ago players joined managers. They wanted to play under those managers and that’s how Arsène had an advantage, because he is a wonderful person, by all accounts. Think of the Ramsey story about him being contacted by Wenger and Fergie, about how Fergie sent Giggs to show a 17-year-Old around Carrington, but when he got to London Conley he was given the tour by Wenger himself.

That’s where Arsène could steal a march on other clubs but not any more because the ‘project’ and the money is too big.

I’ve moved a little off topic from the Leicester game but I really can’t be bothered to go into the details of how Leicester broke us down, particularly because a red card fundamentally changed the dynamic of a football game, but also because despite rallying, we still have away some shoddy goals.

And we’ll continue to do that until the club can bring in somebody who can analyse the failings of the defensive unit – I’m not just talking about back four and ‘keeper by the way, but the whole way in which we play when we don’t have the ball – and look to take some corrective action.

Some of it I think can be coached. Then there’s a smattering of new signings needed. Then we need to develop an identity. Then we have the makings of a team because there are some good players in there. But right now we’re seeing a rudderless ship that continues to fail when on its travels.

Arsène was given a guard of honour and the fans chanted his name for most of the day and it appears that Burnley even decided to gift Arsenal the freedom of north London yesterday, a gift which Arsenal duly took, then made hay in said sunshine.

Arsène named pretty much the same team as he did against Old Trafford and I have to say I was impressed by the younger players once again. It’s true that the game itself was one in which Arsenal were in pretty much total control of throughout, so defending with backs to the wall wasn’t exactly called for against the Clarets, but I thought Chambers and Mavropanos did really well in the early of the defence, whilst Kolasinac got a great goal and also looked decent going forward.

I’d talked up giving some of these players a run out to see if they’re good enough to stake a claim for next season and whilst I don’t know whether Arsène will still do that against Leicester and Huddersfield, he did yesterday and there was plenty to be pleased about.

My hope is we see more of Mavropanos, Chambers and Maitland-Niles for the next couple of games, because I’m hoping they’re the real deal.

I’ll tell you who is certainly the real deal though, and that is Aubameyang and the Gabon international showed just how good he is in the box yesterday. I know his first goal was a tap in but when you watch the movement again you see just how good he is. He took that step in between the defender and the goal to stay on side at the precise moment which enabled him to touch the ball home. It was a great finish and I have to say I am getting quite excited to see what he can do next season.

I’m also excited for whether Lacazette and Aubameyang start together more often. A lot has been said about the Mkhi and Auba partnership but Laca and Auba appear to be striking up a bond. Add in the mercurial talent of Mesut Özil into the mix and I think we’ve got a very tasty looking forward line. Lacazette got another tidy goal and having gone through quite a drought in the midpoint in the season – probably when we were at our worst – he is cropping up with goals left, right and centre at the moment, which is pleasing when you couple it with Aubameyang’s form. We’ve got some quality players in our attack that’s for sure.

And that was on display yesterday with a 5-0 win. Sure, it doesn’t expunge some of the woeful performances this season, but as a football fan you always need hope and I certainly saw green shoots yesterday and hopefully next season we can see that attacking flair on show, but with a more disciplined and organised defensive set up.

Even Iwobi got on the scoresheet yesterday and the finish for his goal was pretty special, I have to say, with a weird technique but the way he rifled that ball into the roof of the net was very impressive.

The result was a comfortable one in the end and Burnley never really turned up if truth be told. But this was a day of appreciation for Arsène. At a time where the fan base have been fractious and at each other’s throats at one stage, it was nice to see everyone unified in appreciation for a man who has given us plenty of highs and is at least leaving the club with the fans singing his name. If you think about what it could have been if he’d have seen out his contract next season, it could have looked a lot uglier and whilst he’ll be sad he didn’t get to see out this deal and it wasn’t his plan to go, hopefully in hindsight he appreciates that this is better for everyone and we all get to give him the send off his service deserves.

The season is thankfully nearly over. There’s a couple of away games for us to probably lose but let’s just get them done and get on with our lives.

Up the Arsenal.

The World Cup is a pinnacle of a players career and given that when the next one rolls around he will be 36 and probably retired given his recent injury problems, it means this would have been his last World Cup.

What this injury also does is have wider implications because a ruptured achilles is usually at minimum six months out and that means that even if Koscielny had some kind of miracle recovery, he’s probably not going to be match fit for seven or eight months, which takes you to December or January and by then the 2018/19 season will be halfway through.

What it does is bring into stark contrast just what sort of job the new manager has and with Koscielny already unable to play more than once a week anyway due to the problems in his achilles that he’s had, it i’m not dealing in hyperbole when I say that we may never see him return to the same player again and he may not even be a first team regular at Arsenal ever again. That is a sad prospect mainly because somebody who has given so many year’s to the club should be given a decent send off when he leaves but I fear Koscielny’s Arsenal career is probably now hanging by a thread. Just think of it logically if you’re the new manager; you’ve got a player out for half of the season and when he does come back, it’s not going to be until February until he’s back to full fitness, but even then he may not be the same.

It means that the new manager will essentially need to be telling Sven et al that the priority for this summer is an overhaul in the back line. Nacho Monreal is 32, Big Per is retiring, Koscielny is out for most of next season, Bellerin has looked poor, Mustafi is the most inconsistent and erratic defender we’ve seen at the club in decades, David Ospina will probably be off in search of game time, whilst Petr Cech is a dwindling force at 35. In short – this Arsenal defence needs a massive overhaul in the summer.

The initial signs with Mavropanos are good and I liked what I saw from Chambers on Thursday night. He didn’t look overawed by the situation. That’s a good thing because I don’t think we’ll be seeing the new man coning in and signing two centre halves. I suspect he’ll be told that he has to make it work with Chambers, Holding, Mavropanos, Mustafi, then potentially one more signing. I have a feeling that Holding might go out on loan next season though. I don’t have any specific intel, just a feeling, but if that did happen then almost certainly you’d need a player coming in and that player needs to be a talker. I don’t know about you but I’m getting sick of seeing this Arsenal back line not communicate with each other. When you’re in the ground it becomes even more obvious. Big Per had his obvious limitations but he was a talker and he delivered in a composed manner that helped other players around him. Koscielny has never been a talker, Mustafi only talks when he’s moaning at the world after he himself has been the one that made a mistake, so we are seriously deficient in a proper organiser in that defence.

That’s why I am hoping that whoever comes in can identify that and get Sven to cough up an experienced and organised centre half. We would never get him but imagine a Godin marshalling that defence. It would probably bring a minimum of 20% more from every other defender.

But if the stories of the new man only having £50million to spend are accurate, it does mean that there is going to need to be some miracle work pulled out of the bag by the scouting network, because this team isn’t a team that is good enough to just add one player and be done with it. We are in desperate need of a better ‘keeper. You only have to look at De Gea in the game we lost to United at the Emirates at, or Oblak for Atleti, to see that a top class ‘keeper can keep you in games and be a real last line of defence. We haven’t had one of those in a while. Tech was decent enough in his first season but he wasn’t at the same level of some of the ‘keepers we see in the top European competitions these days.

So let’s do some maths here. We probably need a new centre half. We probably need a new ‘keeper. We also should be buying another right back to rotate Bellerin out every once in a while. I haven’t even got to the midfield which, let’s be honest, needs somebody who can cover ground and screen our back four. If we want to be truly competitive in the league next season we need at least three first choice starting XI signings, plus a squad player right back. Doing the math doesn’t exactly fill me with glee. That’s £50million for four players in a market where one right back can be brought for that price.

Quite simply, for me, it means that the younger players in this Arsenal team are going to get given chances and they have to take it. Chambers, Maitland-Niles, Mavropanos, Willock; we need to get them game time between now and the end of the season because when August swings around they’re going to need to be battle-hardened to the Premier League.

I hope Arsene is looking at that too and realising that we need to be giving these guys games now. The remaining games mean nothing and as his final act as manager he should be leaving the squad in a position here we can at least feel that we have some good young players coming through that could make the step up.

Lt’s see what he does on Sunday and for our final two away games.

Catch you all tomorrow.

We’re in Madrid again but this time it’s not the Goliath that is Real, but it’s slightly smaller – but still equally as frightening – cousin Atletico who we face and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if the feeling I have in the pit of my stomach is excitement, fear, nerves, or a bit of everything.

Can Arsenal beat this Atletico team tonight? Of course. Will they be able to overcome a team that showed just how important a rock-steady defensive line can be in knockout competitions over two legs? That I’m not sure.

I’ve listened to the radio, podcasts, watched TV build up, read blogs and written some of my own thoughts. Now it’s down to the team on the pitch and the Arsenal players realising that this season is sh*t or bust when they take to the pitch at 8pm tonight.

In just over 14 hours we’ll know if this team has that fight in them, or if they’re as they’ve been all season; a wilting flower incapable of delivering performances when it absolutely matters.

Last Thursday completely knocked the stuffing out of me. It sapped so much of my confidence and whilst I feel a bit better than I did last Friday, I’m still not really fully believing that we can overcome an Atleti team who really do appreciate the art of defending.

What makes tonight more frustrating is that we know that the emphasis is on us. I’m sure Madrid and Simeone would like nothing better than to turn this into a scoreless testimonial feel of a game if they could. The onus is therefore on Arsenal to come out and so we have to try to make the game as open as possible.

Going forward I’m sure we have no problem with that, but it’s at the back that every time Costa or Griezmann go forward, we’ll be absolutely sh*tting ourselves. That’s because our back line has it well within itself to brain fart on multiple occasions in a game and I suspect we’re going to give Atletico some big chances tonight. What has saved us this season in this competition has been that we have played opposition who don’t take their chances. We presented Östersubds with a few at The Emirates, CSKA it a fair few at The Emirates and both in the home and away leg we have Milan chances. The home game against Atleti was a match between defence and attack because of the sending off, but that won’t be the case tonight.

There are a few people who have said this game is finely balanced because Arsenal can’t defend and if Atleti sit back and don’t try to attack us then they risk the sucker punch. But I don’t see it as that. I see the tie firmly in Atletico’s hands because they have the ability, passing range and players to hold us back, then hit us on the counter with the likes of Griezmann and Costa, whilst players like Koke and Saul can find balls in behind even the best defences, which means our team should be a piece of cake to get in behind in comparison.

Arsène has confirmed Ospina will play in goal but with the amount of balls in behind that I’d be telling my players to take advantage of against this Arsenal team, I’d also be asking him to be playing as an auxiliary sweeper if I was in Arsène’s shoes. I’m not sure just how good Ospina is at that given he loves a bit of the old ‘stand behind the goal line when trying to save’ action, but at least his distribution is better than Cech’s, I guess…

The back line will be the usual four and I suspect we’ll have Xhaka in front of them, but I’d be giving Maitland-Niles a shot alongside him to give us a little more recovery pace than Wilshere offers. I’d play Ramsey further forward with Özil and Mkhitaryan and have Lacazette up top. That team gives us a little more to it than having Wilshere for Maitland-Niles, despite the fact Wilshere played well last week. We all love Jack, we all want the player back that he was eight years ago, but I just don’t see it any more and I worry that a game like today might pass him by from a physicality point of view. He seems to constantly tire in the second half of any game he plays and we will need all of the players who start to be ‘on it’ for the whole time they are on the pitch and with Wenger we know that he leaves it until the absolute latest he can before making a sub. So that’s why I wouldn’t be playing Jack tonight from the start.

But I think we all know what the team will be. If Mkhi is fully fit he starts in place of Welbeck and Wilshere will most likely make the team – probably in the more advanced three with Ramsey and Xhaka behind.

Madrid will probably look to deploy more of the dark arts that they are masters of and we bore witness to last week. They will kick, they will dive, they will wave imagery cards. It will be important for both Arsenal players and the referees not to be fooled by it and hopefully last week’s ref can set the same example tonight. Don’t bank on it though.

I’d love to see a fairytale ending. It would be a dream come true just to get to a European final, as I couldn’t get to the Champions League final and the UEFA and Cup Winners Cup finals I was too young to go. So for me this would represent something so special.

But I’m struggling to make a case for us this evening. All I have is hope. Hope that the players do more than they’ve done all season. Hope that they have the game of their lives. Hope that history can be written by Arsenal Football Club and hope that Wenger gets his last hurrah.

14 hours and we’ll know.

Up the Arsenal.

We’re in Madrid again but this time it’s not the Goliath that is Real, but it’s slightly smaller – but still equally as frightening – cousin Atletico who we face and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if the feeling I have in the pit of my stomach is excitement, fear, nerves, or a bit of everything.

Can Arsenal beat this Atletico team tonight? Of course. Will they be able to overcome a team that showed just how important a rock-steady defensive line can be in knockout competitions over two legs? That I’m not sure.

I’ve listened to the radio, podcasts, watched TV build up, read blogs and written some of my own thoughts. Now it’s down to the team on the pitch and the Arsenal players realising that this season is sh*t or bust when they take to the pitch at 8pm tonight.

In just over 14 hours we’ll know if this team has that fight in them, or if they’re as they’ve been all season; a wilting flower incapable of delivering performances when it absolutely matters.

Last Thursday completely knocked the stuffing out of me. It sapped so much of my confidence and whilst I feel a bit better than I did last Friday, I’m still not really fully believing that we can overcome an Atleti team who really do appreciate the art of defending.

What makes tonight more frustrating is that we know that the emphasis is on us. I’m sure Madrid and Simeone would like nothing better than to turn this into a scoreless testimonial feel of a game if they could. The onus is therefore on Arsenal to come out and so we have to try to make the game as open as possible.

Going forward I’m sure we have no problem with that, but it’s at the back that every time Costa or Griezmann go forward, we’ll be absolutely sh*tting ourselves. That’s because our back line has it well within itself to brain fart on multiple occasions in a game and I suspect we’re going to give Atletico some big chances tonight. What has saved us this season in this competition has been that we have played opposition who don’t take their chances. We presented Östersubds with a few at The Emirates, CSKA it a fair few at The Emirates and both in the home and away leg we have Milan chances. The home game against Atleti was a match between defence and attack because of the sending off, but that won’t be the case tonight.

There are a few people who have said this game is finely balanced because Arsenal can’t defend and if Atleti sit back and don’t try to attack us then they risk the sucker punch. But I don’t see it as that. I see the tie firmly in Atletico’s hands because they have the ability, passing range and players to hold us back, then hit us on the counter with the likes of Griezmann and Costa, whilst players like Koke and Saul can find balls in behind even the best defences, which means our team should be a piece of cake to get in behind in comparison.

Arsène has confirmed Ospina will play in goal but with the amount of balls in behind that I’d be telling my players to take advantage of against this Arsenal team, I’d also be asking him to be playing as an auxiliary sweeper if I was in Arsène’s shoes. I’m not sure just how good Ospina is at that given he loves a bit of the old ‘stand behind the goal line when trying to save’ action, but at least his distribution is better than Cech’s, I guess…

The back line will be the usual four and I suspect we’ll have Xhaka in front of them, but I’d be giving Maitland-Niles a shot alongside him to give us a little more recovery pace than Wilshere offers. I’d play Ramsey further forward with Özil and Mkhitaryan and have Lacazette up top. That team gives us a little more to it than having Wilshere for Maitland-Niles, despite the fact Wilshere played well last week. We all love Jack, we all want the player back that he was eight years ago, but I just don’t see it any more and I worry that a game like today might pass him by from a physicality point of view. He seems to constantly tire in the second half of any game he plays and we will need all of the players who start to be ‘on it’ for the whole time they are on the pitch and with Wenger we know that he leaves it until the absolute latest he can before making a sub. So that’s why I wouldn’t be playing Jack tonight from the start.

But I think we all know what the team will be. If Mkhi is fully fit he starts in place of Welbeck and Wilshere will most likely make the team – probably in the more advanced three with Ramsey and Xhaka behind.

Madrid will probably look to deploy more of the dark arts that they are masters of and we bore witness to last week. They will kick, they will dive, they will wave imagery cards. It will be important for both Arsenal players and the referees not to be fooled by it and hopefully last week’s ref can set the same example tonight. Don’t bank on it though.

I’d love to see a fairytale ending. It would be a dream come true just to get to a European final, as I couldn’t get to the Champions League final and the UEFA and Cup Winners Cup finals I was too young to go. So for me this would represent something so special.

But I’m struggling to make a case for us this evening. All I have is hope. Hope that the players do more than they’ve done all season. Hope that they have the game of their lives. Hope that history can be written by Arsenal Football Club and hope that Wenger gets his last hurrah.

14 hours and we’ll know.

Up the Arsenal.

Apparently the disappearance from the touchline tonight of Jurgen’s right hand man Zeljko Buvac is somewhat down to us, if you believe what you read in the papers, if I’m honest I’m disinclined to do most of the time, but with Arsenal fans looking enviously over at the pace of the Liverpool attack it worries me that the Arsenal board are considering a ‘left of field’ appointment like this.

Let’s face it; despite Ivan’s assertions that there is plenty of experience in picking a new manager, the club itself has seen a generation of people walk through the doors everywhere else except the manager and at board level. So the idea that they are best placed to pick a gem hardly fills me with the greatest of confidence.

I have nothing against Buvac. For all we know he could be the next Pep. But history tells us that the transition from assistant to first team manager/head coach is one in which few make the step up successfully. McClaren, Queiroz, Robson, Terry Phelan; all of these guys have failed at the highest level and I’m sure if I put more thought into it I’d find that there are many more from other clubs.

But on top of that there is the question of how many of these assistant managers/coaches go on to lead any of the ‘big clubs’.

The answer is: very few.

Because it’s almost like a different game entirely. The pressure is much more intense, the margin for error is so small, the possibility for failure is higher and forgiveness isn’t exactly in abundance.

There’s also the question around Arteta. He has much more goodwill that he could gleam from everyone if he was manager. Yet the same issues remain for me and that is that he has no real experience of a role at the top. He has never been a manager and so from my perspective it feels like this is an appointment too soon for the perfectly haired Mikel.

Perhaps in a job or twos time, when he’s proven he can excel, he’d be a choice we’d all be asking for, but not now and not with his current lack of experience. So the same applies for Buvac. If he was a man who was at another club for a few seasons to prove his pedigree then by all means, but not Arsenal as a first job, surely not?

Unless of course the club think that this kind of random and left of field appointment would be perfect because:

1. He’d work within the confines of the budget he has
2. He’d be comparatively cheap compared to some of the elite names that have been mentioned
3. He’d be happy to bring through some of the young players
4. The club think that they can ‘do another Arsène
5. Lots of managers are being put off by succeeding the manager- the poisoned chalice kind of thinking

I’m not so sure on the last point because the club is a very attractive offer, they’d pay the main man a nice fat wedge, plus the man himself – if the ego is big enough – will consider that he can take the club to glory with what is in place at the moment.

It’s a very uncertain time at The Arsenal and the news of Buvac as a possible appointment seems to have only just hit me of the task that lays ahead of the club in the coming weeks. It’s a massive decision and the powers that be need to think long and hard about this. A poor decision could cost the club both competitively and financially and you only have to look at the four or five of years that Liverpool has languishing where we are right now to see just how difficult it is to climb your way up the greasy Premier League pole.

I think I’ve been in denial. I’ve just focused on the fact that change is finally coming and now it has hit home just he difficult it might get for us next season, depending on the start we have, so the decision that is taken in the next few weeks could change the immediate future in the club for either better or worse.

I just hope that whoever comes in has the right start. We’ve had years of toxic and fractious fans at each other’s throats. It would be nice to just all going back to being Arsenal fans all pushing in the right direction.

Catch you all tomorrow for a match preview.

Feeling excited? Nervous? Can’t wait until Thursday?

I am all of the above. I would also add ‘petrified’ because in the main I worry that by this weekend the season – and Arsène’s reign – will slowly chug to a very undramatic ending with games at home to Burnley, away to Leicester and then away to Huddersfield. Having watched ‘The Feud’ on Channel 5 in the UK and seen the way Fergie bowed out, then see us dominate Madrid last Thursday, I actually started to believe it was possible for a fleeting moment. But that was extinguished with Griezmann’s goal and since then I’ve been stewing on the fairytale ending that we probably won’t be getting, given what we’re up against in two days time.

But do you know what? This is better than if we’d have been knocked out already and the season was already just plodding along to it’s inevitable conclusion. I am reminded of a quote from The World is Not Enough when old Brosnan is reminded that “what’s the point in living if you cannot feel alive?”. I know it’s not exactly the greatest movie of all time to be referencing, but at least that’s how I feel, because at least we’re getting the excitement, nerves, probably the likelihood of pain of defeat, but to have that right up until just over a week before the season ends is at least something.

I went running this morning and halfway through my run my wireless headphones ran out of battery. Which meant I no longer had Arsenal-related podcasts to listen to, but was just alone with my head, which meant that I started to actually think about the last few years and the trophies I’ve seen us win. And boy, I wouldn’t change that feeling for the world. There are plenty of fans – like Tottenham fans for example – who don’t get the same level of excitement and jubilation that we’ve had even in the declining years. But we’ve had them. In the current cold light of day when the feeling of our slow and steady domestic decline it’s all still a little too raw for me to praise Arsène. But I feel like in 12 to 18 months time I’ll look back on even these latter stages of his time at the club with fondness.

That’s mainly because of those cup final memories. In three years time I’m not going to give a sh*t about where we finished in the league in 2014, 2015, or 2017, because I’ll have that one big day out to remember and as an Arsenal fan who’s parents aren’t really into football, I never really properly got to experience all of the cup wins of the 90s and early years under Wenger. I had to watch from afar on TV and so when I was able to get tickets via my own means and get there to experience that excited build up, well, that was something special.

If Football is about memories as much as living in the ‘now’, I can at least be grateful that the manager has brought us that. He’s kept us at least excited for something and he and the players have delivered that, even if it’s only for a few more days.

Im not saying that I am not looking forward to the new regime, I am not saying I’m having second thoughts about whether he should stay – it’s clear that wouldn’t work – but I am saying that just for those very small pockets of time in the last four years – semi final and final – we’ve by and large had fantastic memories that will last in many of our minds for as long as we’re on this Earth.

Hey, maybe miracles can happen, maybe we can get to the final. And maybe we’ll even have Santi on the bench. He’s said he’d like to play some part and I think the nostalgic part of all of us would love that, but I think him getting any game time this season is highly unlikely, given he’s had a year and a half out of the game. It will be a sad end to his Arsenal career but he’ll get the send off he deserves on Sunday and I hope he plays again in some capacity for somebody next season.

I remember when I first saw him in an Arsenal shirt. We smashed Southampton 6-1 and a ball was punted high into the sky at The Emirates. As it landed by his feet he touched it once to stop it stone dead, then spun on his axis to completely wrong-foot a Southampton midfielder, then wheeled away and released the ball to put us on the attack. That was the moment – instantly – I knew we had somebody special. He’s proven that over the years that’s for sure.

But Arsenal, like Santi, like Arsène, need to move on and if sentiment is in the way of bringing through the next generation, then we have to be pragmatic. We have some exciting young players coming through and they need to be given there chance. So I suspect Santi will be given a warm reception on Sunday and then I suspect that will be the last time we will see him in and Arsenal shirt on the Emirates turf. *Sad Face*.

Anyway, let’s not end on a sad note, instead preferring to appreciate that the season is still alive – just – and we are two days away from a defining point in it.

Catch you all tomorrow.

I sigh because despite our opponents on the night Atletico Madrid being down to ten men, despite having lots of the possession, despite creating plenty of chances, despite an amazing atmosphere in the ground (I’ll ignore the horrific flags we were given – think post marathon foil they give you, or a red bag your mum lays down by the front door after you’ve come back from a game as a kid and you’re told to strip off your Sunday league kit on a wet April morning) we found ourselves with an absolute Everest to climb next week away in Madrid. All because of a moment of stupid defending that has been our Achilles heel all season. And therefore should probably come as no surprise to any Arsenal fan.

And I’m afraid I am struggling to see how we overcome it in the cold light of day.

Arsène sprung few surprises given who was available to him and Jack came in for the injured Elneny, whilst Özil returned to the team and for the opening exchanges whilst it was 11v11 we had the better of it. Lacazette hitting the post gave hope, plus the players seemed to respond to the roaring home support, which all pointed to some positivity on a lovely Wednesday evening.

Then the sending off came and you knew Arsenal would control the rest of the game. It was just a matter of whether we had enough going forward and concentration defensively not to switch off. And in that first half – a couple of scary moments when Ospina had the ball at his feet (man do we need a new ‘keeper in the summer) we controlled the ball, created chances, but just couldn’t get it on target and even when we did, Oblak – what a ‘keeper he is by the way – was there with some stunning saves – two in each half stand out where he was at full stretch.

Second half felt like more of the same and when Lacazette scored with still plenty of time on the clock, it felt like the players sensed something could be had in terms of more goals. But there’s a few things that they didn’t account for.

Firstly, Atletico Madrid are very, very disciplined at the back. They let Arsenal have the ball in wide positions and put cross after cross in for their compact defence to deal with. And they did. They headed away ball after ball and made some impressive last ditch tackles. It’s amazing how much more beneficial it is to your team when you have a capable back line, eh?

Secondly, they are masters of the dark arts, and they really are absolute perfectionists at that. Time wasting, sly kicks, diving, imaginary cards, more time wasting. They have absolutely everything in their locker and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that next week they will deploy them. They even have super villain himself Diego Costa to do his unholy best in the return leg. Only with a home crowd roaring on they’ll most likely get a load more decisions, even more than they got tonight, I’d wager.

Thirdly, Arsenal have an extremely soft underbelly and the current defence is always an accident waiting to happen. Atletico didn’t have a sniff all game and yet what we saw was one ball over the top that undid us. Koscielny was calamitous with his attempted clearance, Mustafi fell over trying to cover, and Madrid got their precious away goal with their only shot in the game. It was keystone cops stuff from a defensive line that has been horrendous all season and on the one major time in which they had to deliver – because they had little else to do all night – they were found wanting.

And that, my friends, I fear is that. Because Atletico don’t concede at home. And we concede anywhere. And from any kind of position. And at all times. Defensively we are an accident waiting to happen and whilst Madrid can shut up shop, we couldn’t in a million years and without Aubameyang and Mkhitaryan in our attack – assuming the latter is injured – we’re unlikely to have enough to unlock them.

I’m sorry that today’s blog seems so down, but when that red card was shown there was relief everywhere that we needed to make this count, and as usual we haven’t. We created plenty of chances – 28 attempts in all – but when you come away from a home leg with that many and you still have only one goal to show for it, it doesn’t bode well for part II.

Of course there’s hope, of course this Arsenal team are capable of something special away, but I just feel like of all of the teams in Europe Atletico are the ones most suited to seeing out a second leg. Which is why I am pretty down this morning.

I wanted the fairytale ending to the season for us and for Arsène. I wanted him to finally break his European trophy drought. I wanted us to have a shot at Champions League football next season. But we haven’t addressed defensive frailties all season and this is what happens when you bury your head in the sand on one of the most crucial parts of the game – the art of defending.

Next week we’ll go there with blind hope, but the optimism after that first 20 minutes will not be there for most of us. After that United game at home this season in which we played them off the park I was gutted. It hit me hard because despite dominating a team we still shot ourselves in the foot. The same feels like it’s happened to us last night.

Which is why this morning I ‘sigh’.